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»^ •t^ t i^ o> -^ 






PLUTARCH 



LOMDON : PRINTED BY 

SPOTTISWOODE AND CO., NEW-STREET SQUARE 

AND PARLIAMENT STREET 



PLUTARCH 

HIS LIFE, HIS LIVES 
AND HIS MORALS 



J^aur ^tttuMS 



BV 

RICHARD CHENEVIX TRENCH, D.D. 

ARCHBISHOP OF DUBLIN 




M A C M I L L A N AND CO. 



All rights res er zed 






V^<^^' 



Corrigenda 



Page 75, lines 14, 15. This is a mistake. The book was reprinted in 1657. 
,, 97, line 13, Jbr magnificent read magnifical 
„ 97, ,, 23, y^?* virtues r^rti^ motions 
,, 120, last line but two, ybr avrrj? read auroC 
,, 129, line \Oy for serpent ^'^^^ scorpion 



PREFACE. 

In preparing for the press a Lecture upon Plutarch 
which I deHvered last year to a small Literary Society 
in Dublin, I was insensibly led on from one point 
to another, until, and I may say quite against my will 
and intention, that one had grown into four. I might 
hesitate to publish so much about one with whom 
everybody assumes himself familiar, were it not that, 
where such is indeed the fact, it is in almost every 
case only with his Lives that this familiarity exists. 
The other writings of Plutarch, not unworthy of being 
known, are for all this so slightly known, that this 
little volume, more than one half of which is dedi- 
cated to them, may, perhaps, contain enough which 
is not altogether old and outworn to justify its publi- 
cation. 

Dublin : July 7, 1873. 



CONTENTS. 



LECTURE I. 

PAGE 

Plutarch's life i 



LECTURE IL 
Plutarch's parallel lives . . . .29 

LECTURE ILL 
Plutarch's morals 73 

LECTURE IV. 
Plutarch's morals {continued) . . .101 



Lectures on Phitarch 

LECTURE I. 

Plutarch's life. 

All which we know with any certainty about Plutarch 
must be gathered from scattered notices in his own 
writings ; his contemporaries being absolutely silent 
about him, and some later legends, as that he was 
named Consul by Trajan, having no historic worth 
whatever. The greatest biographer of antiquity, he 
who ^ATOte the Lives of so many others, found none to 
write his own, and did not himself care to \\Tite it. 
The author of a recent article on Plutarch ^ is mistaken 
when he ascribes an autobiography to him. All 
which the \vriter says, on whose authority he relies 
for this statement, is that it would not be difficult to 
construct his biography by piecing together the 
various notices of him which He scattered through 
his own writings. And no doubt there is in him not a 
garrulity, but a pleasant and unaffected willingness to 



In Pauly's Encyklopddie, 
B 



PlutarcJis Life 



speak of himself and of those belonging to him, which 
yields us, when these notices are all collected, a con- 
siderable amount of information about hira. Let us put 
these together as we best may, indicating at the same 
ime the points in which these notices fail us altogether. 

His birthplace was Chaeronea,^ a small town in 
Bceotia, but one by no means without a name in 
ancient story. It commanded the entrance of that 
Boeotian plain, which Epaminondas was wont to call 
*the dancing-plot of Mars,' ^ the lists, that is, in which 
the War-god held his games, fitted as that plain was to 
draw, and actually drawing so often, contending hosts 
to itself, there to clash together in arms. When he 
so named it, two out of the three great battles which 
should best justify the title, and which should all be 
called after this city, were as yet unfought — one of these, 
and the most famous of the three, being that battle 
* fatal to liberty,' in which Greece played against the 
Macedonian her last stake for freedom, and lost it. 

It is not possible to fix with absolute certainty the 
year of Plutarch's birth, and as little that of his death. 
I shall not trouble you with the various hints 
which, put together and combined, lead to the con- 



* De Curios. I ; Sulla, 15, 16 ; Demosthenes, 2. There are 
some pleasant, though somewhat affected, pages about modern 
Chseronea in Hettner's Griechische Reise-skizzen, pp. 293-297. 
An old and finely -wrought marble chair in the village church 
goes by the name of Plutarch's chair. 

2 "Apews opx'flo'Jpap (Marcellus, 2l) ; moXi^ov opxfjorrpav 
{Apophth, Reg., Epaminondas J 18). 



His Visits to Rome 



elusion that the first may be safely placed about the year 
50 of our era. As a young man he pursued his studies 
under Ammonius at Athens — a gentleman therefore, 
and of fairly independent means, for the academical 
course at Athens was scarcely within the reach of any 
other. He will have been engaged in these studies, and, 
if our calculations are right, will have reached about 
his seventeenth year, at the time when Nero made his 
memorable art-progress through Greece, a.d. 67.^ The 
matricide, however, did not venture to enter the city, 
more than any other the sacred haunt of the Furies. 
Plutarch voyaged to Alexandria,^ but whether he pene- 
trated further into Egypt is doubtful. Asia Minor, too, 
he must at the least have skirted, as one of his smaller 
treatises could only have been written at Sardes.^ 

Rome, ^beautiful Rome,' as on one occasion he 
calls it,^ he visited certainly twice, ^ most probably 
oftener; drawn thither, as he tells us, by motives 
pohtical and philosophical.^ What the political were, 
he has not informed us. They may very well have 
been the hopes of obtaining some boon for his native 
city or country ; for he seems to have been counted 
apt for embassies of the kind. Already in his father's 
life-time he was sent by his city on such to the Roman 
Proconsul. It so happened that, from one cause or 



* There is a reference to it, Ei ap. Delph. i. 

2 Symp. V. 5, I. • Anim. an Corp. 4. 

* ri Ka\^ Pc^/at;, De Soler. Anim. 5. * *S)/w/, viii. 7, i. 

• Demosthenes^ 2, 
B 2 



PlutarcHs Life 



another, the colleague who should have gone with him 
was hindered from so doing; but he mentions with 
gratitude the admonishment which he received from 
his father, that, in giving account of the successful 
issue of the journey, he should everywhere speak not 
in the singular, but in the plural, not of what he^ but 
what they^ had effected.^ What the philosophic 
motives were which attracted him to Rome, it does not 
seem hard to guess ; delivering, as he did, lectures 
on ethical subjects in the city which was the heart and 
centre of the world's activity, and no doubt collecting 
there materials for that work, namely the Parallel Lives 
of Greeks and Romans, which was to constitute his 
main title to immortality. That they were no hasty 
or flying visits which he paid to the capital city, is 
sufficiently .evident from the many noteworthy things 
and places .there which he describes or refers to as 
one familiar with th^m.^ 

What was the date of his earliest visit to Rome, it is 
not in our power to say. If we may accept some words 
which he puts into the mouth of one of the speakers 
in his dialogue, On the Skill of Animals,^ as recording 
what he had himself seen in the theatre of Marcellus,^— 
and I should be disposed to do this — he was already 
there in the time of Vespasian, whom he mentions as 
present on the occasion ; that is, before the year 79, in 



^ FrcBC. Ger. Reip, 20. 

^ Thus see Numa, 8 ; Publicola 8 ; FlamiitinuSy I. 
De Soler, Anim. 19. 



Rome under Domitian 



which Vespasian's death took place. Yet this is alto- 
gether uncertain. We can affirm with more confidence 
his presence there during the principate of Domitian, 
as he casually mentions the noble Roman, Arulenus 
Rusticus, as on one occasion among his hearers — 
whom the tyrant, jealous of his virtues, caused to be 
put to death, a.d. 94.^ It was a hideous time to make 
his first acquaintance with Rome, if indeed it was 
then he made it ; for what sights must he have there 
beheld ! the martyrdom of the Stoic philosophers \ the 
persistent warfare against all eminence, all virtue ; the 
murder of the brave and wise ; the bloody spectacles 
of the Circus with its shivering wretches flung in among 
wild beasts ; the prosperous scoundrels of servile birth, 
delators and others, who had won their wealth by a 
thousand crimes, carried in their rich litters ; the 
imperial harlots sweeping by in chariots drawn by 
silver-shod mules, — all that darkened the soul of 
Tacitus and maddened the heart of Juvenal.^ 

And yet it would be a mistake to suppose that even 
under the malignant star of Domitian there was any 
positive suspension of the intercourse of social 
life, any paralysis of literary activity. There was 
evidently nothing of the kind, nothing to render 
impossible such a mission as Plutarch desired to fulfil. 
At Rome he lived in familiar intercourse with many 
of the chief men of the city, the best and noblest 

' De Curios. 15. 

2 Quarterly Review^ vol. ex. p. 472, 



PlutarcJis Life 



Romans of the time : with Mestrius Florus, of whom 
presently ; with Fundanus, to whom the younger PHny 
addresses more than one letter ; ^ with Sosius Senecio, 
another of Pliny's correspondents, ^ — all of them 
men of consular dignity ; and with others not so well 
known to us as these. Thus doing, he was only true 
to his own convictions ; it being in his judgment the 
duty of philosophers to associate, so far as without 
unworthy assentation this might be done, with princes 
and others that had the government of men and men's 
affairs. Nowhere in his view could they spend their 
pains so well, seeing that in profiting one of these they 
in fact profited not merely one, but many.^ Nor, we 
may be quite sure, was there any need on his part to 
court the favour and solicit the good offices of the 
great men of the imperial city. According to the 
fashion — in the main a most honourable fashion — of 
the day, they would have rather courted his society 
than he theirs. When we read of the younger Cato, 
that he spent a brief intermission from the toils of office 
in a journey to Pergamum, if so be he might persuade a 
famous philosopher there residing to take up his abode 
with him,'* when, himself representing the majesty of 
Rome, he was noted to give the right hand of honour 
to another of these philosophers who was walking 



* Ep. i. 9; iv. 15 ; vi. 6. 2 73^ j^ j^. 

^ See his essay, Max. cum Princip. esse disserendum^ through- 
out. 

* Cato Minor ^ 10. 



Imperfect Knowledge of Latin 7 

with him \ ^ these were only exaggerations of the 
deference and observance which was freely rendered 
to them by the great of the world. And in the hun- 
dred years or more which had elapsed since Cato's 
death, this observance of those who were the bringers to 
' rustic Latium ' of the Hellenic culture, and who were 
assumed to be themselves the highest representatives 
of it, had rather grown than diminished. The audacities 
and insolences displayed by some of the unworthier 
members of the great philosophic guild — for such 
with all its inner differences we may call it — attest 
the confidence which they felt in their position, no 
less than the readiness on the part of some among 
them to abuse it. 

What we now read as treatises are in many instances 
the revised and expanded notes of lectures which had 
been orally delivered by him. On more than one oc- 
casion indeed he states as much.^ Though delivered 
at Rome, these lectures, as I need hardly say, were in 
Greek ; for by his own confession he was a poor Latin 
scholar ; having learned the language late in life, and 
even then so imperfectly that he rather took in the 
whole intention of a Latin sentence than construed it 
word by word.^ But the circle of his hearers was little, 
if at all, limited hereby ; for Rome, if not that * Greek 
city ' which Juvenal indignantly calls it,'* had been, and 



» Cato Minor, 57. 

2 De Aud. Poet. I ; De Audie7ido, I ; De Tranquill, Anim. I. 

' Demosthenes, 2. * Sat, iii. 61. 



8 PlutarcJis Life 

probably from an earlier date than we commonly as- 
sume, a Greek-speaking city, everybody there under- 
standing Greek, talking Greek, writing Greek, almost 
as much and as freely as Latin. ^ This ignorance on his 
part of Latin did not weigh very heavily upon him. He 
might have been well pleased to have freer access to 
materials of history which it and it only would supply 
him. But as the key to a literature, we may confidently 
affirm that he was altogether indifferent to it ; for, 
while every Roman who made any claim to a liberal 
education was familiar with Greek literature, no 
Greek condescended to know anything of Latin. 
Utterly effaced as a nation, the Greeks had yet this 
revenge, namely, to believe that they reigned not 
merely supreme, but alone, in that ideal world of poetry 
and art which they claimed as their exclusive domain ; 
they could still refuse to recognize, or even to know 
of, the later conquests in the same domain which their 
conquerors had made. 

The works of Plutarch singularly illustrate the ex- 
tent to which this ignoring of Roman literature reached ; 
for in other regions of human activity he recognized 
their full equality. The only Latin books to which 
he habitually refers are histories, memoirs, and the 
like, with which he could not avoid acquainting him- 
self, if he was to write Roman Lives at all. But with 



* On St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans, written in Greek, see 
Renan, St. Paul, p. 98. 



Horace quoted 07ice 



all his multifarious reading, with all his multitudinous 
citations from his own poets, he has not a single refer- 
ence to Virgil \ nor yet one to Ovid, whose Fasti 
would often have come most opportunely in, where 
Roman Questiofis, as he calls them, questions, that is, 
of Roman archeology, ritualism, and the like, are 
treated by him ; ^ nor, as far as I know, with one ex- 
ception, to any Latin poet whatever. The one excep- 
tion is Horace. A single quotation from the Epistles 
of Horace in his Life of Lucullus, exhausts, if I do 
not mistake, the entire of his references to a poetry 
inferior, it is true, as a whole, to that of Greece, but 
with superiorities of its owti ; ^ stronger-thoughted, 
if not so beautiful ; and, if often only an echo of 
the melodies of Greece, yet in some regions of art alto- 
gether original. His writings leave on us the im- 
pression that, with the exceptions just named, he was 
equally ignorant of the prose literature of Rome. 
There are two passages in his Life of Cicero,^ which 
might seem to indicate a certain acquaintance with 
his philosophic writings ; but after all, not more than 
he could have gotten from Tiro's Life of his master. 



' Thus on Qu. 86 see Ovid's Fasti, v. 489 ; on Qu. 96 see vi. 
458 ; and on Qu. 89 see ii. 512. 

- Lucullus, 39 ; Horace, Ep. I, 6, 40-46. Gibbon therefore 
is not entirely accurate when he affirms that there is no allusion 
to Virgil or Horace in the whole of Greek literature, from 
Dionysius of Halicamassus to Libanius {Decline and Fall, 
c. 2). 

* Cicero, 24, 40. 



I o P hit arc lis Life 

to which in other respects Plutarch was so largely 
indebted. 

I shall need to enter more in detail on his work in 
the lecture-room w^hen I speak hereafter of his 
ethical wTitings; only here I will say, and in general 
terms, that Plutarch belongs to and is a principal 
figure in a very remarkable epoch of the moral history 
of the ancient world. It was not indeed an epoch of 
quickening to a new life, not a palingenesy, nor even 
a rejuvenescence. The old Greek and Roman society, 
as such, was doomed. No revival, in the sense, that 
is, of a new birth, was possible for it. Before such 
could be, a new leaven must be mingled with the old 
and sinful lump. But the second century after Christ 
was an epoch of a very signal recovery and restoration, 
a final rallying of whatever energies for good the 
heathen world possessed, and in this way a postponing 
of its fall, ^vith the total collapse of the old order of 
things, for a good deal more than a century. It 
must have seemed, in the time of the later Julian 
Caesars, as if that fall was imminent ; as though the 
whole fabric of civilized society was about to crumble 
at once into wreck and ruin. All those moral forces, 
the potent but invisible ties which had hitherto held 
it together, appeared to have lost their binding power. 
In that seat of power and pre-eminence, which should 
have been a throne of righteousness, sat monsters not 
merely unworthy to reign, but unworthy to live — and 
indeed unable to live, four of them in little more than 



The Second Century 1 1 

a year dying violent and bloody deaths. It was 
as though the last agony of a world perishing in its 
own corruption had arrived. 

A brief lucid interval under Vespasian and Titus, 
if we may venture to call it such, was followed by 
blacker darkness than ever, by the long and baleful 
tyranny of Domitian. And then, w^hen the gloom was 
thickest, there was the dawn of a better hope. On 
that seat of empire, profaned so long, there now suc- 
ceeded one another a hne of chief rulers, none of 
them wholly unworthy, some of them eminently 
worthy, of that highest place which they held. And 
this was no solitaty token of the beginning of better 
things. Everywhere there went w4th this a reinvigora- 
tion of whatever elements of good that old world 
possessed; and it w^as seen that these, so long 
repressed, kept down, crushed, yet had not perished 
altogether. The ancient virtues were not wholly 
dead. The old religion could still wake up a pas- 
sionate devotion in the hearts of its votaries. Philo- 
sophy could still make good her claims to assist those 
w^ho submitted to her teaching in the right ordering of 
their lives. There w^ent forth everywhere the teachers 
of a morality larger and purer than the heathen world 
had yet produced, — Greek literature itself partaking 
in the revival, and enjoying in Plutarch and Lucian, the 
several representatives of faith and unbelief, in Arrian, 
in Epictetus, in Musonius, and in Dio Chr^'sostom a 
kind of later and Martinmas summer of its own. 



1 2 Plutarch s Life 

It was certainly not an easy task, and, regarded 
from the stand-point of absolute truth, it was an im- 
possible task, which Plutarch, and those who wrought 
with him in this new and noble propaganda, set before 
them. Undertaken by him and by others in perfect 
good faith, it was yet nothing less than a reconciling 
of the popular religion with right reason ; openly 
assailed, or secretly undermined, as that popular reli- 
gion was by so many potent forces arrayed against it, 
by philosophy, by atheism, by Christianity; en- 
cumbered, too, and embarrassed by a mass of fables, 
many of them puerile, not a few immoral. There was 
need to disengage it from the immoral, to trace in 
the seemingly puerile or trivial such an underlying 
meaning as should justify its retention ; while there 
was no choice but to abandon many outworks, if 
only the citadel might so the better be defended. 
Such was their task, among whom Plutarch was 
perhaps the foremost and most influential worker of 
all. If their success was only partial and temporary, 
if in the end they failed where failure was inevitable, 
who shall lay this to their charge ? while for what 
they effected let them have the honour which is 
their due, and which cannot without injustice be with- 
held.i 



* There is an admirable sketch of this reaction, and of Plu- 
tarch's share in it, by Dr. Thiersch, Politik und Philosophie in 
ihrem Verhdltnisse zur Religion unter Trajanus^ Hadrtantis, und 
den beiden Antoninen^ 1853. 



Quickening of the Old Faiths 1 3 

How far he and his fellow-workers may have served 
as heralds of the Gospel, and, though they meant not 
this, have prepared a way for its coming triumphs, 
how far they may have rather hindered and delayed 
those triumphs, is a question which has been often 
debated, and to which very different answers have 
been given. Doubtless, in the quickening of the old 
faiths it was sought by some to find weapons for the 
resisting of the advances of the new ; even as a little 
later there were hot wanting those — as, for instance, 
Julian the Apostate — who were fain to play off the 
revived heathen morality against the ethics of the 
Church, as equal or superior to these ; while from the 
School of the Neo-Platonists, who were the philo- 
sophic outcome of this revival, some of the ablest 
and most determined enemies of the Christian faith 
proceeded. Yet all this cannot rob the movement of 
its interest for us, nor for myself can I believe that 
anything which is good, so far as it is such, can do 
otherwise in the long run than help forward the 
recognition and reception of that which is best and 
highest of alL 

Be this, however, as it may, and to whatever uses 
others may have sought to turn this revival, Plutarch 
himself may be entirely acquitted of any conscious 
attempt to fight against that truth which was higher 
than any which he had, and which within two cen- 
turies was to take the world for its o\\ti. Strange to 
say, Christianity is to him utterly unknown. Even 



14 PlutarcKs Life 

such passing notices of it as we have in Tacitus, in 
Suetonius, in Epictetus, would be sought in his 
writings in vain. As far as has hitherto been traced, 
there is in these no single distinct reference, nor 
so much as an allusion to it. When we call to mind 
his extensive travels, his insatiable curiosity, the pro- 
found interest which he felt in all mofUl and religious 
speculations, the manner in which he was instinctivel}'- 
drawn to whatever was noblest and best, we could 
have no more remarkable commentary than this on 
that word of Scripture, ' The kingdom of God cometh 
not with observation.* If we place his birth, as I 
have suggested, at about the year a.d. 50, then long 
before he began to write, St. Peter and St. P9fil 
must have finished their course. All around him, at 
Rome, where he dwelt so long, in that Greece where 
the best part of his life was spent, in Asia Minor, 
with which Greece was in constant communication, 
in Macedonia, there were flourishing Churches. 
Christianity, if I may so say, was everywhere in the 
air, so that men unconsciously inhaled some of its 
influences, even where they did not submit themselves 
to its positive teaching. But for all this, no word, no 
allusion of his testifies to his knowledge of the exist- 
ence of these Churches, or to the slightest acquaint- 
ance on his part with the Christian books. Of such 
an acquaintance, whether mediate or immediate, it 
seems to me that we can hardly refuse to acknowledge 
some traces and tokens in the writings of Seneca and 



Christia7iity unknown to him 1 5 

Epictetus, but none in his.^ If any notices of that 
sect, which was still everywhere spoken against, and 
which his contemporary Pliny could style ' a perverse 
and excessive superstition,' reached his ears, he pro- 
bably looked at it as a mere variety of Judaism ; for 
of that he often speaks, although without any in- 
sight into its true significance,^ and, like most of the 
Greek and Latin writers of the time, seeing it only on 
its least attractive, or, we might say, its most repulsive 
side. 

Champagny indeed, the historian, in many respects 
admirable, of the Antonines,^ traces a covert allusion 
to Christianity, and to the entrance into noblest houses 
which by the agency of women it often found, when 
in his Precepts of Wedlock Plutarch admonishes the 
wife that she shall have no private w^orship of her 
own, apart from and unknown to her husband, but 
shall honour the gods whom he honours, ' shutting the 
door to all supervacaneous worships and foreign 
superstitions. ' '* It must be admitted that the lan- 
guage of Plutarch lends itself to such an interpretation ; 
while yet, taking into account the many Oriental rites 
of all kinds which were at this time gaining a footing 



* See what Professor Lightfoot, after a very patient examination 
of the whole subject, has said in an Excurms to his Commentary 
on St. PaiiVs Epistle to the Philippians, 

2 Symp. iv. 5, 6 ; De Super st. 3. 

* See Les Antonins, vol. i. p. 442. 

* PrcBC, Conj. 19 : irepUpyois dpr}(TKciaLS kou ^4vais 5€«n- 
datfioviois. 



1 6 PlutarcJis L ife 

in the West, it is impossible to urge this as the only 
interpretation which his words will bear. 

The later years of his tranquil life he spent at his 
native Chaeronea ; which, small and obscure as it was, 
he would not quit, lest, as he says, he should make it 
smaller yet.^ He did not there disdain an humble 
municipal office ; for indeed, as he says himself, how 
should he, having before his eyes the example of 
Epaminondas, who did not refuse the office of 
Helearch' 2 at Thebes, though as such having practically 
little more to do than to take oversight for the right 
cleansing of the streets of the city ? What of highest 
and most honourable in place his native city had to 
bestow, he afterguards obtained.-' 

When I spoke just now of his latter years as spent 
at Chaeronea, this statement does not exclude smaller 
excursions in that land which was to him dear beyond 
every other land. He is' evidently familiar with each 
nook and corner of Greece ; and is well pleased to 
relate, whenever a fair opportunity occurs, what he 
himself has seen of memorials and records, sur- 
viving there to his own day, of her ancient splendour 
and renown — these, both as gratifying his historic 
sense, and as serving to link for him and for his 
readers her humble present with her glorious past. 
Athens, still in his eyes the pearl of Greece, naturally 



Demosthenes y 2. ^ Frcec. Reip. Ger. 15. 

^ Symp, ii. 10, I ; vi. 8, I. 



His Travels in Greece 1 7 

supplies him with the larger number of these. He 
had seen there the house of Phocion, * very mean and 
without curiosity ; ' ^ the underground retreat, * the 
cellar ' North calls it, of Demosthenes ;2 the dedicated 
gifts of Nicias ; ^ and had admired the wondrous works 
of art ^vith which Pericles adorned the city, and which 
still flourished as in the beauty of an eternal youth, * as 
if every of those foresaid works had some living 
spirit in it, to make it seem young and fresh, and 
a soul that lived ever, which kept them in their 
good continuing state."* He had seen at Sparta 
the spear of Agesilaus, which, however, in nothing 
differed from any other spear ; had consulted the state 
archives, that he might learn the names of his wife 
and his daughters ; ^ had been present there when 
on the altar of Artemis Oreithyia young boys had 
endured whipping even to death. ^ We might be 
tempted to think that there was some mistake here, 
only that Cicero reports the same in his time.'^ He 
describes at large, and as an eye-witness, the grand fes- 
tival still kept at Platsea in memory of the victory over 
the Persians won in the neighbourhood of that city, 
and from it deriving its name.® He speaks from per- 
sonal knowledge of Philopoemen's statue at Delphi, 
and refers to it as disproving the assertion of some 



* Phocion^ 18. * Agesilaus^ 1 9. 

2 Demosthenes ^ 7, ^ Lyairgiis^ 18 ; Aristides, 1 7. 

* Nicias y 3. ' Tusc. ii. 14, 34. 

* Pericles^ 13. " Aristides, 19, 21. 

C 



1 8 Pbctarclis Life 

that this ' last of the Greeks ' was of an ill-favoured 
countenance.^ 

While we may light almost anywhere in Plutarch's 
writings, and often where we should have least ex- 
pected it, on some autobiographical notice, obtain 
some pleasant glimpse of the man himself or of his 
surroundings, it is perhaps his Symposiacs^ or Table 
Talk, in which these are found strewed the most 
thickly. We derive from the same many pleasant and 
instructive hints concerning the social life of the time, 
among that class of well-conditioned scholars and 
of gentlemen more or less devoted to letters and 
philosophy, who constituted the circle which Plutarch 
drew round him, and in which he most cared to move. 
These Syrnposiacs are evidently no fancy pieces, but 
brief records of conversations which actually sprang up 
by one occasion or another at entertainments in which 
Plutarch, either as guest or host, took part ; and were 
put into the permanent shape in which we have them 
at the request of Sosius Senecio, his Roman friend, 
to whom these, as well as some of his Fa^-allel Lives 
and of his ethical treatises, are addressed. 

The speakers, Greeks, as we conclude by the names, 
for the most part, but not exclusively, are naturally 
different upon different occasions, though there are 
names which recur pretty often. Of some we know 

* PhilopcEinen^ I, For other notices of the same character, 
see Solon, 25 ; Themistocles, 22 ; Alexander, 69. 



His Family and Frie)uis 1 9 

nothing, except what we learn about them from 
Plutarch himself in this Table Talk or elsewhere : as 
his father, often mentioned, but nowhere named ; 
his grandfather, Lamprias, who could relate curious 
anecdotes which he had heard from eye-\\'itnesses, of 
the Alexandrian revels of Mark Antony ;^ himself of 
excellent good sense, if we may judge from one dis- 
course of his which is here recorded.^ These the 
elders of the house, taking share in some of the earlier 
discomrses, disappear from the later ; indeed in one 
of the latest he speaks of his grandfather aa dead.^ 
Others, too, there are of the family, as his father-in-law 
Alexion ;^ his brother Lamprias, probably, as bearer 
of his grandfather's name, an elder brother, and 
evidently a character : a good trencherman, as 
became a Boeotian ; ^ one who on occasion could 
dance the p}Trliic war-dance;^ who loved well a scoflf 
and a jest,^ even as no doubt it was counted an ex- 
cellent jest by his Greek hearers, w^hen he undertook 
to prove that the Latin words ha\ing to do with 
banquets were ' many times more properly de\dsed 
than the Greek ;' and who, if he thrust himself some- 
what brusquely into discussions which were going 

* Antoniiis, 28. For other family traditions relating to the 
same time, and reaching as far back as to his great grandfather 
Nicarchus, see the same Life, 68. 

* Sy??ip, V. 5. ' Ibid. ix. 2, 3. 

♦ Ibid. vii. 3. * Ibid, ii. 2. 

• Ibid, ix. 15, I. 

' Ibid. viii. 6, 5 : v^pi(TT^s Kal (pLXoyeXus (pvaei. 
C2 



20 PltitarcJis Life 

forward, was quite able to justify the intrusion.^ 
Another brother, Timon by name, is a frequent 
speaker ; to whom and to whose affection for himself 
Plutarch bears elsewhere this touching record (I quote 
from Philemon Holland's translation of his ethical 
works, of which I shall have occasion to speak more at 
large hereafter) : 

For mine own part, to say somewhat of myself, albeit 
that Fortune hath done me many favours, in regard 
whereof I am bound to render unto her much thanks, there 
is not any one for which I take myself so much obliged and 
beholden unto her, as for the love that my brother Timon 
hath always shewed and doth yet shew unto me ; a thing 
that no man is able to deny, who hath never so little 
been in our company, and you least of all others may 
doubt, who have conversed so familiarly with us.'^ 

Add to these Glaucias the rhetorician,^ Praxiteles the 
historian,^ Hermas the geometrician,^ Nicias the phy- 
sician,^ Themistocles the stoic philosopher and a de- 
scendant of the great Athenian,^ Theon, Marcus, 
and Protogenes, grammarians," by which name, as I need 
hardly say, much more was then than would now be 
impHed. Of the last of these one would gladly know no 
more than we learn about him here, but he puts in a 
very unpleasant appearance elsewhere.® Besides 
these there is a king Antiochus Philopappus, who 



* Symp. i. 2, 5. * De Frat,Amor, 16. ' Symp, ii. 2. 

* Ibid, viii. 4. ^ Ibid. ix. 2. ® Ibid. vii. i. 
' Ibid, i. 9, I ; Themistocles^ 32. ^ Amat. 4. 



His Friends and Associates 2 1 

sometimes takes part in these conversations, and to 
whom Plutarch dedicates one of the happiest of his 
moral treatises. His royal title has long been a 
puzzle to commentators ; but he was in all likelihood 
a son or grandson of Antiochus, the petty king of 
Commagene, harshly stript by Vespasian of his 
little principality, a.d. 72, but afterwards, with his 
sons, kindly treated, such royal allowances and titular 
dignity being granted to him as we have not seldom 
granted to dethroned princes of India. ^ 

Others are better known to us, as Ammonius, men- 
tioned already as Plutarch's teacher, a Peripatetic 
philosopher, and probably the same, some fragments 
of whose learned work ' On Altars and Sacrifices ' 
have reached us; as Mestrius Florus, a man of con- 
sular rank, and, as Plutarch reports, a devoted archaeo- 
logist ; ^ the same who, sitting at table with the Emperor 
Vespasian, admonished him that he should not pro- 
nounce 'plostra' but ^plaustra';^ Vespasian, who, 
when jests were flying, was not wont to remain in any 
man's debt, greeting him the next day they met as 
Mestrius Flauros, (pXavpog being an Attic form of 
(pavXoc, and meaning good for nothing. In his com- 
pany, Plutarch tells us elsewhere, he visited in Cisal- 
pine Gaul the field of Bebriacum, the scene of the 
overthrow of the army of Otho ; and heard from his 



* Josephus, B. y. vii. 7, 1-3. 

2 <pi\apxa7oSy Symp. vii. 4, I ; cf. viii. 2, 2. 

* Suetonius, Vespasiamis^ 22. 



2 2 PhitarcJis Life 

lips, for he had been present at the battle, some 
striking particulars of the tremendous carnage of the 
day.^ Herodes is another frequent speaker, Herodes 
Atticus, as we cannot doubt,^ famous as an orator 
and a millionaire.^ Add to these his friend and 
Plutarch's, partaker too of the most intimate councils 
of the Emperor Adrian, the sophist Favorinus, no 
unimportant person in his time ; to whom Plutarch 
has dedicated more treatises than one.'* The list is 
not yet nearly complete, but these may suffice. 

On the whole, the questions raised and discussed 
at these banquets would bear creditable comparison 
with the after-dinner discourses of our own day, 
and not less the spirit in which the discussions were 
conducted. The fact that they do not, for the most 
part, turn on subjects very profound or abstruse, 
cannot be esteemed a fault ; it is only on rare occa- 
sions that such would have been other than unsea- 
sonable. Sometimes they are trivial enough, perhaps 
the triviality itself constituting the attraction, as when 
a question is raised whether it was the right hand 



* Otho^ 14. On the same occasion he saw at Brixellum the 
modest tomb (' modicum et mansurum,' Tacitus, Hist. ii. 49, calls 
it) of Otho, 18. 

^ Symp. viii. 8. I. 

^ See Friedlander, Sittengeschichte Roms, vol. iii. p. 120, for 
an account of magnificent edifices built by him and presented to 
various cities. 

"* Some of the best chapters in the Nodes Atticce of Aulus 
Gellius are records of sayings or discourses of his. 



After-dinner Questions 23 

of Venus, or the left, which Diomed wounded.' 
Philological questions come in for their share of 
attention, Plutarch and his friends for the most 
part proving true to that ' unspeakable spirit of ab- 
surdity,' which Niebuhr lays to the door of the 
ancients, as often as they meddled with this subject.^ 
The happiest among these arguments are such as 
would spring up naturally and easily at a banquet, 
and liave more or less reference to a right ordering 
of th.s. Thus there is a very lively and full discus- 
sion on the use and abuse of * Shadows ; ' by which 
name, as I need hardly inform you, were designated 
uninvited guests, whom it was counted that persons 
of any distinction, being themselves invited to a 
banquet, were privileged to bring in their train, and 
vhole troops of whom they sometimes did bring — 
m intolerable embarrassment of any feast, as it seems 
to us ; but a custom to which the arrangements of 
ancient feasts must have somehow lent themselves 
more easily than we can quite understand.^ Then 
again there is another excellent discussion on the 
question whether the giver of a feast does best, 
himself ranging his guests in their several appointed 



* Symp. ix. 8. Latin authorities would not have gone very 
far in such company as this ; else Virgil had already settled the 
question, when he makes Diomed to say, ' Veneris violavi vulnere 
dextram ;' but probably if Plutarch's Greek friends had heard of 
Virgil, this was as much as they had done. 

2 Thus see Symp. ii. 4, the proposed derivations of iroA?;. 

' Symp, vii. 6. 



24 Plutarch! s Life 

places, or leaving them to range themselves.^ 
Another is on the qualities which a rex co?tvivii 
or modimperator ought to possess.^ I have said 
that they sometimes take a more earnest tone ; as 
for instance, one raises the question, why we are 
pleased with the mimic presentation of things yhich 
it would be most displeasing to us to witness in 
reality ; ^ or, more earnest still, the guests in another 
discuss in what sense Plato affirms that God ge6met- 
rizes,^ — if indeed Plato does anywhere affirm aught of 
the kind. * 

The places where these Table Talks were held are 
naturally very different, but the most of them in 
Greece. It is at one time at Plutarch's own house at 
Chaeronea ; or at his brother Timon's ; or at that of 
some principal inhabitant of the same, to welcome his 
return from Alexandria, or from his longer absence 
at Rome; or they find -place at Eleusis after the 
celebration of the mysteries ; or at Delphi, where 
Plutarch was clothed with certain hereditary priestly 
functions ; at Corinth ; at Thermopylae ; or at the table I 
of one Callistratus, who kept almost open house at 
Galepsus, a Greek watering-place, pleasantly de- 
scribed, and wonderfully resembling a German Spa 
at the present day;^ or lastly at Athens, where his 



* Symp, i. 2. ^ Ibid. i. 4. 

^ Ibid. V. I. •* Jbid. viii. 2. 

* Ibid. iv. 4: * Galepsus, a town of Euboea, where there be 
baths naturally of hot waters, is a proper seat and place fitted by 



His Symposiacs 25 

teacher, Ammonius, being chief officer ((rrparr/yoc) of 
the city, entertains all the most famous professors of 
the University at what is meant to be a feast of 
reconciliation, such as shall help to bring them 
to forget some past differences. The feast has unfor- 
tunately a very different issue, ending as it does in 
general confusion, in an universal challenging and 
defying on their parts of one another -^ this banquet 
of the philosophers being, curiously enough, the only 
one of these banquets at which perfect harmony 
does not reign throughout. Before quitting these 
Symposiacs I cannot help observing, how strangely 
little use has been made, in descriptions of the 
social life of Greece and Rome at this period, of 
them and other miscellaneous writings of Plutarch. 
Gibbon has drawn upon them hardly at all, Merivale 
not very much, Friedlander something more. 

As Plutarch was happy in the wider circle of his 
friends, so not less in the innermost circle of all, that of 



nature for sundry honest pleasures, beautified with many fair 
houses and lodgings, in such sort as it is reputed the public 
hostelry of all Greece. This town flourisheth more in the midst 
of spring than at any other season ' of the year ; for much con- 
course there is thither at that time, who converse familiarly one 
with another, feasting mutually, and taking the benefit of that 
great affluence of victuals and abundance of all good things ; where 
having nothing else to do of great importance, they pass the most 
part of the time in devising and discoursing together of good 
letters and matters of learning.' 
* ^ymp. ix. I, I. 



26 PhUarcJis Life 

his own family. K letter of consolation addressed 
to his wife, Timoxena, on the death of a little 
daughter (she had died while he was absent from 
home, which must explain the epistolary form), assures 
us of this, besides showing him in a very tender and 
very attractive light as a father and a husband ; ^ as 
one also to whom the words of the Arabian patriarch, 
'The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away,* 
would have sounded no strange language, if it could 
have reached his ears. This letter, too, is precious, as 
affording us glimpses of a family life, the existence of 
which we are too apt to forget when we are taking 
account of the moral condition of the ancient heathen 
world, too easily assuming, as we do, that what as 
wickedest and worst is there denounced, is a fair 
specimen of the whole. Surely there must have been 
many other homes where there prevailed the same 
simplicity, the same sobriety, the same affection, the 
same indifference to the pomps and vanities of the 
world, as in his. In this letter he commends his wife 
that she gave no place to ^ the turbulent storms of 
sorrow and passionate motions of anguish/ * the 



* How profoundly he apprehended the mystery of the mar- 
riage relation a few words from his Amat. 24, will attest : t) Se tcDv 
&k\c»}5 (TviJL^iovuTUJp KputTis Tois /cot' 'EiriKOvpop cKpa^s Kol TrepnrkoKois 
eoiKe^ (TvyKpovcr^is Kayi^dvovaa koX aTroTrrjBijacLS, cvSriira 5e ov 
iroiovaa roiavrrjv, oiav "Epcos iroici, ya/uLiKris KOivavias iiriXa- 
06iJL€vos. This is not very far from * They two shall be one 
flesh.' He has another striking passage on the same subject in 
his Pnzc. Co7ijug. 34. 



Letter to His Wife 2 7 

excessive and insatiable desire of lamentations/ which 
were so common in that heathen world where so 
many sorrowed without hope.^ But this self-command 
takes him not by surprise, for that same constancy 
had not failed her at the death of her eldest born, 
nor again ' when that gentle and beautiful Chaeron 
departed from us untimely, in the prime of his years.' 
And then, after much reminding her of the joy which 
they had in that child which was gone, and of the 
duty of thankfulness for this joy, he proceeds : 

Take you no heed to those tears, plaints, and moans 
that men or women make who come to visit you at this 
present ; who also, upon a foolish custom and as it were 
of course, have them ready at command for every one ; 
but rather consider this with yourself, how happy you 
are reputed, even by those who come unto you, who 
would gladly and with all their hearts be like unto you, 
in regard of those children whom you have, the house 
and family which you keep, and the life that you lead ; 
for it were an evil thing to see others desire to be in your 
estate and condition for all the sorrow which now afflicteth 
us, and yourself in the meantime complaining and taking 
in ill part the same ; for herein you should resemble 
very well those critics, who collect and gather together 
all the lame and defective verses of Homer, which are but 
few in number, and in the mean time pass over an in- 
finite sort of others, which were by him most excellently 
made. 



^ Compare his praise of Cornelia, the mother of the Gracchi, 
on the same account {Caius Gracchus^ 19). 



28 Plutarcfis Life 

Nor will he bring this letter to a close without 
bidding her to yield no credit to them who would fain 
persuade that the soul, once separate from the body, 
is dissolved ; and he reminds her how they had both 
been initiated into those Eleusinian mysteries, and 
made partakers in them of that hope of immortaUty, 
which, if not taught in those mysteries in as many ex- 
press words, yet so pierced through and informed the 
ceremonies and the symbols, that many of the noblest 
hearts in the ancient world were by them strengthened 
to believe that beyond this world there was a higher and 
a nobler, and one in which all of precious w^hich was 
lost here should again be found. Let her comfort 
herself with these thoughts. 

Such, as it presents itself to me, vfas the calm and 
equable tenor of Plutarch's life ; a life which was long 
drawn out, and rich in the honour, the troops of 
friends, and in other of those blessings which should 
accompany old age. But not in blessings of this 
world only. That it was a life not unillumined * by 
heavenly hope and high humility,' that he walked cheer- 
fully in such Hght as was vouchsafed to him, and was 
in earnest to lead others to walk in the same ; that he 
was one of those whom we contemplate with thanks- 
giving, even the heathen who, not having a law, were 
yet a law unto themselves j this I trust to show 
before I have brought these lectures to a close. 



Plutarch a Greek 29 



LECTURE II. 

Plutarch's parallel lives, 

A BOOK does not fail to acquire an additional 
interest in our eyes, becomes to us a far more real 
and genuine thing than otherwise it would have been, 
when we can trace it as gro\nng by a kind of ne- 
cessity out of the conditions in which the writer found 
himself, as the result not of a mere literary activity 
impelling him to write something, but as the product 
and outcome of these his surroundings, as they acted 
upon him, and he in return upon them. It is seldom 
that a book has the seal of immortality upon it, which 
in' any other way has come into being. Such a book, 
as I take it, is the Parallel Lives of Plutarch, the 
probable genesis of which I will now venture to 
trace. 

Plutarch, as I have said, was a Greek ; but the 
Greece which he saw around him bore little resem- 
blance to the Greece of an earlier and more glorious 
age. She was the shadow of her former self, and only 
haunted with the spectres of her ancient renown. All 
her grand but turbulent activities, all her noble agita- 



30 PlutarcJis Parallel Lives 

tions were spent. Living Greece was no more. The 
Imperial rule, it is true, was more tolerable for the pro- 
vinces — and Greece was a province, or rather the part 
of a province — than that of the tyrannous oligarchy, of 
a Verres or a Piso, which it had superseded ; but the 
change had brought, and could bring, no revival with it. 
She had played her part once in the world's story — a 
part at once too glorious and too exhausting to be 
played a second time. And now her cultivated fields 
were lonely sheep-walks ; her flourishing cities had 
dwindled into pelting villages ; and, with a little ex- 
aggeration, it might have been written of her as 
Algernon Sidney, in a very memorable passage, writes 
of the Italy of his day : ' for the most part the lands 
lie waste, and they who were formerly troubled with 
the disorders incident to populous cities, now enjoy 
the quiet and peaceable estate of a wilderness.' 

All the accidents of time,, all the greedy rapine of 
Roman proconsuls and Roman emperors may have 
been unable sensibly to diminish the number of the 
statues which still peopled every comer of Hellas, her 
streets, her groves, her temples, with forms of exqui- 
site grace and beauty ; but if these, the works of men's 
art, survived, the men themselves were no more. Many 
causes working together had so depopulated the land, 
that all Greece, as Plutarch himself assures us, could 
scarcely have sent in his day 3,000 heavy-armed men 
into the field, that being exactly the number which 
the one insignificant city of Megara sent in the glo- 



Decay of National Life 31 

rious days of old to the great armed gathering at 
Platsea.^ And the evil was of long standing. A 
century earlier, Athens, which had passionately es- 
poused the cause of Pompey, could send him no more 
than three ships as her utmost contribution to his 
cause. ^ 

There was indeed another Greece, the Greece of 
literature, of art, of rhetoric, of philosophy, which was 
mighty still, which perhaps never was mightier, pene- 
trating and pervading as it did with its spirit ever)^ 
interstice of society, and making all its own. But this 
Greece had its haunt and home ever)^where rather 
than in that land which was still called by this name, 
and from which all those influences, which were now 
hellenizing the whole civilized world, had first pro- 
ceeded. Not to say that in all this there was but 
poor compensation for the fact that the sceptre of 
dominion had passed into other hands \ that, whatever 
harvest of men Greece, thus understood, might bear, 
artists, grammarians, rhetoricians, philosophers, there 
w^ere other sorts, the statesman, the warrior, whom 
she could bring forth no more \ while her own offspring, 
with all their talents and accomplishments, were too 
often not so much Greeks as GreekHngs, haunt- 



• De Def. Orac. 8. For some glimpses of the desolation of 
the Island of Euboea, seeDio Chiysostom's pretty little romance, 
Orat. 7, Venator. 

2 Lucan, Pharsal. iii. i8i ; compare Finlay, Greece tinder 
the RovianSj vol. i. passim. 



32 PhitarcJis Parallel Lives 

ing the antechambers, and seeking by ignoble assen- 
tation to win the favour, of their Roman patrons and 
lords. 

I put an emphasis on this : for I cannot doubt that, 
patriot as Plutarch was, this spectacle of the political 
nullity of the Greek nation, of the utter decadence 
and decay of that land which he loved fo well, was a 
motive which wrought mightily with him, urging him 
to show what manner and breed of men she once had 
borne, men that could be matched and paired with 
the best and greatest among that other people w^hich, 
having passed her in the race, was now marching in 
the forefront of the world. He was fain to show that 
Greece had worthies whom she could set man for 
man over against the later breed of Rome, and not 
fear a comparison with them. 

At Rome, too, if there was not the same perishing 
of strength and manhood, if the great sinful city sat 
throned on her seven hills, the object of the world's 
worship and wonder, there was much which may well 
have moved a thoughtful student of history to hold 
up before the living generation a faithful portraiture 
of what their fathers once had been ; to remind 
them by what virtues, by what temperance, what 
frugality, what self-sacrifice those had made, and in a 
sense had deserved to make, the world their own ; if 
so be he might bring the men of his own time to recog- 
nize how far they had fallen, how much farther they 
were in danger of falling, from those moral heights on 



Decay of Natio7ial Life 33 

which their forefathers had walked of old. He must 
have felt that for Rome also her roll of creative men 
was well nigh completed, that her mightiest and best 
were in the past, that it was time to gather up the 
records of these, to set them forth in their good and 
in their evil, in all which they offered of example, in 
all which they afforded of warning to his own con- 
temporaries and to the after world. 

Yet while he may have meant, and no doubt did 
mean, primarily to benefit others, he gladly acknow- 
ledges the benefit which he derived himself from the 
work in which he was engaged (Of old Sir Thomas 
North's translation of the Parallel Lives ^ which I have 
here used, I shall speak by and bye) : 

When I first began to write these Lives y my intent was 
to profit other ; but since continuing and going on, I 
have much profited myself by looking into these his- 
tories, as if I looked into a glass, to frame and fashion, 
my life to the mould and pattern of these virtuous 
noblemen. For running over their manners in this sort^ 
and seeking also to describe their lives, methinks I am 
still conversant and familiar with them, and do, as it 
were, lodge them with me, one after another. ... I do 
teach and prepare myself to shake off and banish from 
me all lewd and dishonest conditions, if by chance the 
company and conversat^n of them whose company I 
keep, and must of necessity haunt, do acquaint me with 
some unhappy or ungracious touch. ^ 



D 



34 PlutarcHs Parallel Lives 

We may perceive, I think, already some of the 
causes to which may be traced the rare and eminent 
success of Phitarch as a biographer. But to enter a 
Httle more particularly into this matter, what, it may 
be asked, is the charm and alluring power in these 
Lives^ which has made them, as Madame Roland has 
expressed it, ^ the pasture of great souls ' {lapature des 
grandes ames\ the favourite reading of kings and 
captains, of men learned and men unlearned, 
of noble and simple, of women and boys? That 
they have been this, it needs no words of mine to 
prove. I might quote the consenting voices of 
famous men of almost all ages and countries. But 
these I must pass over ; or rather^ in the room of all, 
cite some few words from a very charming letter of 
Henry IV, of France to his wife, in which he ex- 
presses the delight with which he has learned from 
her that she is finding pleasure in the reading of 
Plutarch. * You could not,' says the King, * have sent 
me tidings more agreeable. To love him is to love 
me ; . for he was the instructor of my early years ; and 
my good mother, to whom I ow€ so much, who so 
watched over the formation of my character, and who 
was wont to say that she had no desire to see her son 
an illustrious ignoramus, put this book into my hands 
when I was little more than an infant at the breast. 
It has been as my conscience, and has whispered in 
my ear many good suggestions and maxims for my 
conduct, and the government of my affairs.' I will 



Poptdariiy of the Lives 35 

only add a single word from another quarter. ' It 
is our breviary/ says Montaigne.^ 

In answer to the question, AVhat is the secret of his 
popularity — a popularity which, if not quite equal now 
to what it was at the Renaissance, has yet stood the 
test of ages, — I should be disposed to ascribe it, first 
and chiefly, to the clear insight which he had into the 
distinction between History, which he did not \\Tite, 
and Biography, which he did. The sense of this distinc- 
tion was one not obscurely and unconsciously work- 
ing in his mind ; but from many utterances it is plain 
that he set deliberately before himself the difl'erence 
between these two, and the further fact that his 



•■ One more testimony to the book may find place in a note. 
It is from the preface which Amyot prefixed to his famous 
translation of it, and is a noble specimen of French in the six- 
teenth century as written by a master of the tongue : * Les 
vieux et les jeunes y ont une infinite d'avertissemens si notables 
et certains, que le plus sourd du monde lisant ou oyant un tel 
maistre est contraint de baisser le front, et donner gloire a la 
verite se faisant si bien ouyr en la bouche d'un pauvre payen. On 
voit comme il tient en bride la prosperite, comme il redresse 
I'adversite, de quelle adresse il retranche les aisles a I'orgueil, a 
I'ambition, a I'amour des choses corruptibles ; et au contraire de 
quelle vehemence il enflamme les lecteurs a la detestation du 
vice, a I'amour de vertu, et comme il les esleve hors de cette vie 
terrienne. Considerez un peu comme il esmeut les affections, et 
vous ramenterez a vous-mesme combien de fois les discours de 
ce sage philosophe vous ont irrites contre les meschantes per- 
sonnes qu'il eschaffaude, ont amoUi vostre cueur, le fleschissant 
a craincte, amour et compassion.' 

D 2 



36 Pluta7'cJis Parallel Lives 



business was with the latter and not with the former. 
Vivid moral portraiture, this is what he aimed at, and 
this is what. he achieved. It is not too much to 
affirm that his leading purpose in writing these Lives 
was not historical, but ethical. More or less of 
historical background he was obliged to give to the 
portraits which he drew ; but always and altogether 
in subordination to the portrait itself. Whatever 
displayed character, served in any way to interpret 
the man, brought out his mental and moral features — 
this, however small it might seem, was precious to 
him, was carefully recorded by him ; whatever was 
not characteristic, however large, he foreshortened, if 
he could not let go altogether ; passed wholly by, if 
he could, as something with which he had no 
concern. He has, in more places than one, ex- 
pressed himself on this point. Thus in his Life of 
Alexander, he desires his readers not to blame if he 
omits many things, and these of great importance — 
for, he goes on to say, *the noblest deeds do not 
always show virtues and vices ; but oftentimes a light 
occasion, a word, or some sport, makes men's natural 
dispositions and manners appear more plain than the 
famous battles won, wherein are slain ten thousand 
men.'^ So too in his Life of Nicias, all he informs the 



* Alex. I. * He might even have gone on to say that an apocry- 
phal anecdote often throws as much light on a man's character 
as an authentic one ; current stories about people are often, 
perhaps generally, exaggerated ; but the peculiar qualities which 



Biography not History 37 

reader, which Thucydides has told, he will be found 
lightly to pass over — ^ and in the rest I have endea- 
voured to gather and propound things not commonly 
marked and known, which will serve, I doubt not, to 
decipher the man and his nature.' ^ 

This was what he proposed in each case to himself, 
*to decipher the man and his nature,' to know him in 
his entirety, and in that same entirety to present him 
to the contemplation of others. There are biographers 
who deal with the hero, and biographers who deal 
with the man ; but Plutarch, as has been said, is the 
representative of ideal biography, for he delineates 
both in one, is never satisfied until he has connected 
what was personal and private in those about whom 
he is writing, with what was transcendent and heroic, 
and blended all, so far as his skill, and that is eminent, 
allows, into one consistent whole. On these pregnant 
hints of character which Plutarch so much loves to 
preserve, Montaigne has said excellently well, ' There 
are in Plutarch many long discourses, very worthy to 
be carefully read and observed ; but withal there are 
a thousand others, which he has only touched aud 
glanced upon, where he only points with his finger to 



are picked out for exaggeration are pretty sure to show what a 
man's character really is. ' — Freeman, Historical Essays, Second 
Series, p. 276. 

^ Nicias, I ; compare Cato Minor, 24, 37 ; Timolcon, 15. Tha 
he has sometimes pushed this process too far, even his gi*eatest ad- 
mirers have freely acknowledged. Thus Sclioemann, in the Pro- 



38 PlutarcJis Parallel Lives 

direct us which way we may go if we will, and 
contents himself sometimes with only giving one brisk 
hit in the nicest article of the question, from whence 
we are to grope out the rest.' ^ 

It was inevitable that one who thus studied the 
smaller incidents in the story of men's lives, who pro- 
fessed to learn so much from these, should set a high 
value on what we call anecdotes. It is true that the 
treasurers and retailers of these are not always the 
wisest of men, often very far indeed from such. With 
allusion to this fact, Samuel Rogers was wont, as I 
remember, in the latest years of his life to say of him- 
self that he was in his smtcdofage. Had he meant 
this in earnest, he would have done himself infinite 
wrong, for his anecdotes were ever bright and spark- 
ling ; and, if sometimes with a sting in them, yet, so 
far as my own experience went, never with an en- 
venomed one. The number of what we may call by 
this general name, scattered over the writings of 
Plutarch, is enormous. He might sometimes seem to 



legomena to his excellent school edition of the Agis and Cleo??te7ieSy 
1839, p. xxiv. : *Fuit tamen Plutarchus politicse illius, et, ut Polybii 
verbis utar, pragniaticoe rationis in vitis scribendis aliquanto, 
quam velles, negligentior ; nee satis reputavit eorum, qui in re 
publica versati sunt, ne mores quidem et consilia satis ex omni 
parte intelligi et sestimari posse, nisi omnibus civitatum, in qui- 
bus vixerunt, causis ac rationibus, vel domesticis vel extemis, 
accuratissime perspectis.' 

* Essay 25 (Cotton's Translation). 



His Anecdotage 39 

be of the same mind with the French historian, 
Prosper Merimee, who has somewhere said, *Je 
n'aime de I'histoire que les anecdotes,' — the words, of 
course, having only a faint umbrage of truth in the 
one case and in the other. Yet, numerous as those in 
his pages are, they are never poor, pointless, and un- 
meaning. They are often replete with the very highest 
meaning ; while for not a few among them we may be 
the more thankful to him, seeing that, except as pre- 
served for us by him, they would not have reached us 
at all. 

Thus it is from Plutarch we learn that it was Philip 
of Macedon who first styled a plain downrightness of 
speech which is hampered by no scruples of delicacy 
whatever — the calling of a spade a spade ; and it is 
worth while to know the occasion on which he did so. 
Certain traitors who had delivered the city of Olyn- 
thus to his hands, and who afterwards haunted his 
court, complained to the King that some of those 
about him gave them that opprobrious name which 
by their treachery they had so richly earned, but for 
redress got only this reply, * My Macedonians are a 
rude and ill-mannered people. They call a spade a 
spade.' ^ 

Here again is a word, the finished grace, the aa- 
Tttov of which must have signally commended it to 
Plutarch, seeing that he has repeated it four times at 



» Apophth, Reg., Philippiis, 15. 



40 PlutarcJis Parallel Lives 

the least, and it may be oftener. In this also Philip ot 
Macedon appears, though a flute-player, and not the 
King, is the hero of it. This last had managed to 
get into a controversy with a musician on the 
number of stops in a certain instrument, or some 
other slight technical detail of his art. Philip was 
certainly in the wrong, yet showed no disposition to 
give way ; on the contrary, was ill-content that the 
other would not yield the point to him ; who, unable 
to do this, but seeing the necessity of bringing the dis- 
cussion to an end, did so with this happiest turn, at 
once so firm and so respectful, ' God forbid that your 
Majesty should know these things as well as I do.' ^ 

That Philip was able to understand and enter into 
all which was in these words conveyed, namely, that 
there are accomplishments which do not become men, 
and least of all great men, we see plainly from some 
words by himself on another occasion addressed to 
his son Alexander, who ' at a certain feast had sung 
passing well, and like a master in music' * Art thou 
not ashamed, son, to sing so well ? ' ^ Let me venture 
to quote some words from my mother's Remains^ 
which seem to me to explain this indignation of his : — 
' It is singular how ill, in general, men bear little 
talents and accomplishments, and how much more 
overweening they are made by them than by great 
ones. This seems to justify what one considers at 



* Symp. ii, I, 12 ; Apophth. Reg,^ Philippus^ 29. ^ Paides^ i. 



His A necdotage 4 1 

first as English prejudice — the sort of contempt that 
excelling in ornamental branches of education is so 
apt to bring on a man, unless managed with great 
address and apparent indiiference to them ; and in- 
deed, even then I believe they rather take from his 
dignity.' 

But pass we on from Philip to Philip's greater son. 
Here are three or four mots of his, and they are 
only three or four out of a multitude which Plutarch 
has preserved for us ; and having heard these, ask your- 
selves whether by their aid * the great Emathian con- 
queror ' does not stand out before you in distincter 
outline than he otherwise would have done? and, more 
generally, whether Niebuhr is just and fair when he 
speaks of these in the main as 'Avretched stories?^ 
This, for example, is his reply to his father, who had 
asked him, being a boy of twelve years, whether he too 
would not contend as well as others for the prizes at 
the Olympic games — ' Yes,' he replied, ' when I have 
kings for my competitors.' ^ Surely the child who 
could so speak was father of the man. 

Or take another word of his, to my mind a very cha- 
racteristic one. With all his sins and crimes, we can- 
not deny to Alexander a genuine, though fitful, mag- 
nanimity. It utters itself in this follo^nng word of 



' Lectures on Ajtcient History^ vol. ii. p. 298 (English Trans- 
lation). 

- Apophth. Reg.^ Alexaiidei\ 2. 



42 PhUarcfis Parallel Lives 

his. A humble friend once asked from him a modest 
sum of money, as a dowry for his daughter, and would 
fain have put back the fifty talents which Alexander 
sent him, saying that a much smaller sum, which he 
specified, would satisfy all his needs. Surely it was a 
right royal answer which Alexander made him, such at 
least to my mind it is, though Seneca instances it as 
a supremely foolish one,^ ' This which thou askest 
may be enough for thee to receive, but it is not 
enough for me to give/^ 

Another word of his implies upon his part a fine dis- 
crimination of character. He was accustomed, Plu- 
tarch tells us, among his chief friends most to honotir 
Craterus, and most to love Hephsestion ; and to justify 
this distinction, saying that Craterus was a lover of 
the King ((piXojSaffiXevc) and Hephaestion a lover of 
Alexander ((pi\aXiE,nvdpoQ).^ The antithesis thus sug- 
gested, as is familiar to many, has in modem times 
been taken possession of, and transferred to relations 
the most sacred ; some having ventured to distinguish 
St. Peter and St. John, as that the former was a lover 
of Christ {(piXo-xpLaroc) and the latter a lover of Jesus 
((piXtrjffovg), 

And other sayings of Alexander are full of insight 
and well worth preserving. Thus when some spoke of 



^ Z>e Bene/, ii. i6 : Animosa vox videtur et regia, cum sit 
stultissima. 

Apophth. Reg.^ Alexander^ 6. 
3 Ibid. 27. 



Saying of Epaminondas 



Antipater, whom he had left to govern Macedon 
in his absence, that he always went dressed in plain 
apparel, and argued his humility therefrom, — 'Nay,' 
said the King, ' but Antipater is all purple within/ ^ 
Another presents him in a tenderer light. His mother, 
Olympias, whom also he left behind him, was constantly 
quarrelhng with and intriguing against Antipater; 
he, on the other hand, writing long letters full of com- 
plaints and accusations against her, the most part, no 
doubt, of these perfectly well founded. * Doth not 
Antipater know,' Alexander exclaimed, on receiving 
one of these long catalogues of her offences, * that 
one tear of my mother will wipe out a thousand such 
letters as these P'^ 

There is indeed an exquisite tenderness in some of 
these sayings which Plutarch has handed down to us. 
They are such as only a good man, one of strong 
domestic affections, would have seen in their true 
beauty, or would have cared to treasure up for the 
after world. His Life of Epaminondas (the greatest 
miUtary genius whom Greece produced, for Macedon 
was not Greece, and, take him all in all, her noblest 
and completest man), is unfortunately lost ; but Plu- 
tarch otherwhere loves to record of him this, namely, 
that he was wont to count as the main felicity of his 
life, and heaven's choicest gift to him, that it was his 



' Ttt 56 ivtov 6\oTr6p(pvpos {Apophth. Reg., Alexander, 17,) 
* Alexander, 39. 



44 PhitarcHs Parallel Lives 

fortune to win the battle of Leuctra — a battle which 
had raised his native Thebes to the leadership of 
Greece — his father and his mother both being alive. ^ 

I take two or three more sayings, almost at random, 
and shall not follow up any further the ' anecdotage ^ of 
Plutarch. They will shew, I think, that he knew what 
in this kind it was worth his while to* preserve, and 
what to leave. Thus some one boasted, in the 
hearing of the philosopher Chilon, that he had not an 
enemy. ' Have you a friend ? ^ the other asked him. — 
To a citizen of Megara, a small and insignificant 
place, who at a common council of Grecian States 
was talking big and laying down a policy, Lysander 
rejoined, ^ Your words want a city.'^ — Chabrias, the 
famous Athenian general, did not scruple to say, — and 
there was a profound knowledge of men, of the need 
which they have of being led, of the electric currents 
which may pass from one into many, in the saying — 
' Better an army of stags led by a Hon, than an army 
of lions led by a stag.'^ 

Not dwelling on these any longer, I would wil- 
lingly, if this were possible, pass in review before you 
some few among the grand series of historical tableaux 
which the Lives present. What solemn, and often- 
times what tremendous, tragedies of history are here 
unrolled, one might almost say acted, before our eyes. 



^ An Sen, Ger. Resp. 6 ; Nee Suav. Viv. Posse ^ i6. 

=^ De Disc. Ad. et Aju. 32. ^ Apophth. Reg.. Chabrias, 3. 



His descriptive Powers 45 

I would instance, as standing out among these, the 
capture and death of Philopoemen -^ the defeat, flight 
and murder of Pompey ^ (* le plus beau morceau de 
Plutarque,' Chateaubriand has called it, though in 
this verdict I cannot agree) ; the final parting of Brutus 
and Cassius,^ so wonderfully reproduced for us by 
Shakespeare ; the grim concluding scene of the younger 
Cato's life, and how ' the morning broke and the little 
birds began to chirp,' while the fatal work was still to 
do ;^ the suicide of Otho,'*^ his account of which, rest- 
ing evidently on the same authorities as that of 
Tacitus, need not fear a comparison with it, having 
indeed preserved some touches which the other has 
let go j ^ the magnificent triumph of Paulus ^milius 
after the conquest of Macedon, with the funerals in his 
own house, which furnish the dark background to the 
pictured Other historic pictures he has, embracing 
still wider reaches of sorrow and anguish \ as, for 
example, his account of the immense catastrophe 
in which the Athenian expedition for the conquest of 
Sicily ended,^ or, not less terrible, that of the Parthian 
campaign of Crassus, with the death of his noble son, 
and the flinging down of his own head, like that ot 



^ Philopicmen^ 20. 

- Pompciii^^ 72-80. ^ Brutus, 40. 

* Cato Mi7wr, 6S-70. * Otho, 16, 17. 

* Thus compare Tacitus, Hist. ii. 46, and Plutarch, Otho, 15. 
' Paulus yEmilius, 35, 36. * Adidas, 26-29. 



46 PhitarcJis Parallel Lives 

another Pentheus, as a ghastly trophy at the wild 
Bacchic revel of the Parthian king.^ 

We hear much at this day of word-painting, which, 
however, often in my judgment fails in its intended 
effect, being too evidently the result of effort and 
design. Plutarch, and he with no effort at all, will 
often match wnth the foremost artists in this line. 
Let me cite in proof his description of the battle- 
array of the Cimbri, in that * decisive battle of the 
world ' in which Marius destroyed, not an army only, 
but a nation, and made plain that, if Rome was indeed 
to perish, and the fierce children of the North were to 
execute the doom upon her, the day of that doom 
had not yet arrived. I can quote but a fragment, 
yet what a picture it presents : 

As for the troops of their footmen, because they should 
not open and break their ranks, the foremost ranks 
were all tied and bound together with girdles, leather 
thongs, and long chains of iron; but their horsemen, 
which were fifteen thousand, marched before in sump- 
tuous furniture, for they had helmets on their heads 
fashioned like wild-beasts' necks, and strange bevers or 
buffs to the same, and ware on their helmets great high 
plumes of feathers as they had been wings, which to sight 
made them appear taller and bigger men than they were ; 
furthermore, they had good cuirasses on their backs, and 
carried great white targets before them ; and for weapons 
offensive every man had two darts in his hand to bestow 



' Crassus, 33. 



Engines of Archimedes 47 

afar off ; and when they came to hand strokes, they had 
great heavy swords, which they fought withal near hand.^ 

Another magnificent battle-piece, which, however, 
I cannot afford to quote even in part, is his account 
of the glorious victory which Timoleon won, on the 
banks of the Crimesus in Sicily, over the hosts of 
Carthage ; the stars in their courses fighting for him, 
and, in fighting for Greek instead of Phoenician 
domination, fighting for all the best hopes of the 
world.2 And yet another is the winning by Marcellus, 
and, after the winning, the dedicating by him, of the 
spolia opima which he had won in single combat 
from the Gaulish king. ^ But the same Life of 
Marcellus yields another passage, the description, 
namely, of the effect of the war-engines which Archi- 
medes invented and employed for the defending of 
Syracuse against the • Romans. Extraordinary as the 
account may seem, in all likelihood it is scarcely an 
exaggeration; being as Archimedes probably w^as 
the most inventive genius in his own line of things 
whom the world has ever seen. Hear it, at least in 
part : 

Now the Syracusans, seeing themselves assaulted by 
the Romans both by sea and by land, were marvellously 
perplexed, and could not tell what to say, they were so 



Marius^ 25, 27. ^ Timoleon^ 27, 28. 

8 Marcellus, 7, 8. 



48 PhctarcJis Parallel Lives 

afraid ; imagining it was impossible for them to withstand 
so great an army. But when Archimedes fell to handle 
his engines, and to set them at liberty, there flew in the 
air infinite kinds of shots, and marvellous great stones, 
with an incredible noise and force on the stidden, upon 
the footmen that came to assault the city by land, bearing 
down and tearing in pieces all those which came against 
them, or in what place soever they lighted, no earthly 
body being able to resist the violence of so heavy a weight 
— so that all these ranks were marv^ellously disordered. 
And as for the gallies that gave assault by sea, some w^ere 
sunk with long pieces of timber like unto the yards of 
ships whereto they fasten their sails, which were 
suddenly blown over the walls with force of these engines 
into their gallies, and so sunk them by their over great 
weight. Other being hoised up by the prows with hands 
of iron, and hooks made like cranes' bills, plunged their 
poops into the sea. Other being taken up with certain 
engines fastened within, one contrary to the other, made 
them turn in the air like a whirligig, and so cast them 
upon the rocks by the town walls, and splitted them all 
to fitters, to the great spoil and murder of the persons 
that were within them.^ 

But neither is it always these scenes of suffering 
and agony and terror which he paints. Over against 
these, and as a relief to these, I might set before you 
scenes not a few of a rare idyllic beauty, as when he 
tells us of the peace which reigned all over Italy (this, 
of course, a fancy picture), in the reign of Numa ; ^ 
or describes the calm and honoured and beautiful old 



Marcellus^ 15. - Nunia, 20. 



Sir Thomas North's Translation 49 

age of Timoleon,^ with the persistent gratitude, not 
ahvays the portion of deUverers, shown to him by the 
Sicilians so long as his life lasted, and to his memory 
when he was dead. Or I might bring before you, 
though certainly not idyllic at all, the famous descrip- 
tion of Cleopatra sailing up the Cydnus to meet Mark 
Antony, 2 which Shakespeare has done little more than 
put into verse ; but more than refer to these I cannot. 

The book was fortunate in its first introduction to 
the knowledge of the English reader. It is true that 
Sir Thomas North, whose translation made its first 
appearance as early as the year 1579, did not draw 
from the original Greek, that his book is the trans- 
lation of a translation, being derived, and announcing 
itself as derived, from Amyot's French version ; and as 
such reproducing Amyot's blunders and mistakes, 
while it adds some more of its own. But for all this, 
as a document marking a particular stage of the 
English language, and some of the best aspects of the 
language at that time, I hold it to be of very high 
value, and give no heed to Dryden^s disparaging 
judgment about it. It may not have the same amount 
of interest for the student of English as Amyot's trans- 
lation has for the student of French, nor mark an 
epoch in our language as distinctly as that other does 
in the French. But for all this, the book contains 
treasures of idiomatic English, of word and phrase 



Timoleon, 38. ' Antonius^ 26. 



50 Plutarc/is Parallel Lives 

which have now escaped us, and whereof no small 
part might with signal advantage be recalled.^ We 
may trace, too, in this volume some of the processes 
by whose aid our vocabulary was at that day enriching 
itself from the classical tongues which were then being 
familiarly studied in England. The book contains a 
multitude of Greek and Latin words in course of 
naturalization, and only half naturalized as yet ; trans- 
planted into English, but in the classical terminations 
which they still retain bearing about them the tokens 
of their foreign origin, which only at a later date they 
should wholly lay aside : as, for example, these : — 
* Academia,^ ^ sedilis,' ' the Law Agraria,^ ' the Sea 
Atlanticum,* ' aristocratia,' ' the Sea Caspium/ ' cen- 
tauri,^ ' Creta,^ * democratia,' ^ helleborum/ ' hemi- 
stichion,' * the Sea Mediterraneum,' * obeliscus,' 
' ostracismos,* ^ parallelon/ * praedicatum,' ' the moun- 
tains Pyrenaei,' ' subjectum,' * Troia,' and the like. 

But the highest title to honour which this book 
possesses has not hitherto been mentioned, namely, 
the use which Shakespeare was content to make of it. 
Whatever Latin Shakespeare may have had, he cer- 
tainly knew no Greek, and thus it was only through 
Sir Thomas North's translation that the rich treasure- 
house of Plutarch's Lives was accessible to him. 



' On the linguistic merits of Amyot, see some excellent re- 
marks in Sainte-Beuve, Causeries de Limdi, vol. iv. p. 459-465, 
with which compare what Montaigne (Essays, ii. 4) has said upon 
the same theme. ^ 



PhUarch and Shakespeare 5 1 

Nor do I think it too much to affirm that his three 
great Roman plays, reproducing the ancient Roman 
world as no other modern poetry has ever done — I 
refer to Coriolanns^ J^uliiis Ccesar^ and Antony and 
Cleopatra — would never have existed, or, had Shake- 
speare lighted by chance on these arguments, would 
have existed in forms altogether different from those 
in which they now appear, if Plutarch had not written, 
and Sir Thomas North, or some other in his place, had 
not translated. AVe have in Plutarch not the frame- 
work or skeleton only of the story, no, nor yet merely 
the ligaments and sinews, but very much also of the 
flesh and blood wherewith these are covered and 
clothed. 

How noticeable in this respect is the difference 
between Shakespeare's treatment of Plutarch and his 
treatment of others, upon whose hints, more or less 
distinct, he elsewhere has spoken. How little is it in 
most cases which he condescends to use of the 
materials offered to his hand. Take, for instance, his 
employment of some novel, Bandello's or Cinthio's. 
He derives from it the barest outline — a suggestion 
perhaps is all, with a name or two here and there, but 
neither dialogue nor character. On the first occasion 
that offers he abandons his original altogether, that so 
he may expatiate freely in the higher and nobler world 
of his own thoughts and fancies. But his relations with 
Plutarch are different — different enough to justify, or 
almost to justify, the words of Jean Paul, when in his 

£ 2 



52 PliUarcJis Parallel Lives 

Titan he calls Plutarch ^ der biographische Shakespeare 
der Weltgeschichte/ What a testimony we have to the 
true artistic sense and skill, which with all his occa- 
sional childlike simplicity the old biographer possesses, 
in the fact that the mightiest and completest artist of 
all times should be content to resign himself into his 
hands, and simply to follow where the other leads. 

His Julius Ccesar will abundantly bear out w^hat 
I have just affirmed — a play dramatically and poeti- 
cally standing so high that it only just falls short 
of that supreme rank which Lear and Othello^ 
Hamlet and Macbeth claim for themselves with- 
out rival or competitor even from among the creatures 
of the same poet's brain. It is scarcely an exaggera- 
tion to say that the whole play — and the same stands 
good of Coriolanus no less;j-is to be found in 
Plutarch. Shakespeare indeed has thrown a rich 
mantle of poetry over all, which is often wholly his 
own ; but of the incident there is almost nothing 
which he does not owe to Plutarch, even as con- 
tinually he owes the very wording to Sir Thomas 
North. 

It may be worth while a little more closely to 
follow this out. The play opens with the jealousy on 
the part of the tribunes at the marks of favour shown 
by the populace to Caesar : this down to the smallest 
details is from Plutarch, so too is that which follows : 
the repeated offering by Antony of a crown to Caesar at 
the Lupercalia, with his reluctant refusal of it ; this 



Shakespeare s ytclms Ccesar 53 

blended indeed into one with an earlier tender- 
ing to him of special honours on the part of the 
senate ; Caesar's early suspicions in regard of ' the lean 
and wrinkled Cassius/ with his desire to have about 
him men fat and well-liking ; the goading on of 
Brutus by Cassius, and the gradual drawing of him 
into the conspiracy, with the devices to this end ; the 
deliberation whether Antony shall share in Caesar's 
doom, and the fatal false estimate of him which 
Brutus makes ; so too whether Cicero shall be admitted 
to the plot, with the reasons for excluding him ; the 
remonstrance of Portia that she is shut out from 
her husband's counsels, and the proof of courage 
which she gives; then, too, all the prodigies which 
precede the murder, — as the beast without a heart ; 
fires in the element ; men walking about clothed as 
in flame, and unscorched by it ; the ill-omened birds 
sitting at noonday in the market-place ; Calphur- 
nia's warning dream, and Caesar's consequent resolu- 
tion not to go to the senate-house ; the talking of 
him over by Decius Brutus ; the vain attempt of 
Artemidorus to warn him of his danger \ the ides of 
March ; the apprehension at the last moment that all 
has been discovered, with the hasty purpose of 
Cassius, only hindered by Brutus, to kill himself 
thereupon; the luring away of Antony from the 
senate-house by Trebonius ; the importunate pleading 
of Metellus Cimber for his brother, taken up by the 
other conspirators ; the striking of the first blow from 



54 Plutarch! s Parallel Lives 

behind by Casca ; Caesar's ceasing to defend himself 
when he recognizes Brutus among his murderers ; his 
faUing down at the base of Pompey's statue, which 
ran blood ; the deceitful reconciliation of Antony 
with the conspirators ; nothing of this is absent. All, 
too, which follows is from Plutarch : 4he funeral 
oration of Brutus over Caesar's body, and then that 
which Antony has obtained leave to deliver ; the dis- 
playing of the rent and bloody mantle ; the reading 
of the will ; the rousing of the fury of the populace ; 
the tearing in pieces of Cinna the poet, mistaken for 
the conspirator of the same name ; the precipitate flight 
of the conspirators from the city ; their re-appearance 
in arms in the East ; the meeting of Brutus and 
Cassius ; their quarrel, and Lucius Pella the cause of 
it ; the reconciliation ; the division of opinion as to 
military operations ; the giving way of Cassius, with 
his subsequent protest to Messala that he had only 
unwillingly done this; the apparition of Caesar's 
ghost to Brutus, with the announcement that he 
should see him again at Philippi; the leave-taking of 
Brutus and Cassius, with the conversation on the Stoic 
doctrine of suicide between them; the double issue 
of the battle ; the disastrous mistakes ; the death of 
Cassius by the sword which had slain Caesar ; the 
ineffectual appeal of Brutus to three of his followers 
to kill him, a fourth at length consenting : all this, 
with minor details innumerable, has been borrowed by 
Shakespeare from the Lives of Caesar, of Brutus, and 



Shakespeare s Antony 55 

of Mark Antony ; which all have evidently been 
most carefully studied by him. 

Yet for all this, Shakespeare does not abdicate his 
royal pre-eminence ; but resumes it at any moment 
that he pleases. Thus Plutarch tells us of that 
funeral oration by Mark Antony, how, 

to conclude his oration he unfolded before the whole 
assembly the bloody garments of the dead, thrust through 
in many places with their swords, and called the male- 
factors cruel and cursed murtherers.^ 

It is well said — a graphic touch ; but mark how 
Shakespeare has taken possession of it : 

' You all do know this mantle ; I remember 
The first time ever Casar put it on ; 
'Twas on a summer^s evening, in his tent ; 
The day he overcame the Nervii. 
Look ! in this place, ran Cassius' dagger through : 
See, what a rent the envious Casca m.ade : 
Through this the well-beloved Brutus stabbed ; 
And, as he plucked his cursed steel away, 
Mark how the blood of Caesar followed it ; 
As rushing out of doors, to be resolved. 
If Brutus so unkindly knocked, or no ; 
For Brutus, as you know, was Caesar^s angel.' 

In A7ito7iy and Cleopatra^ and in the adaptation of 
the story, as it lay before him in the pages of Plutarch, 
to the needs of his art, Shakespeare had a much 
harder problem to solve than any which yuliiis 
Ccesar offered ; and his solution of this problem, when 



* Antonius^ 14. 



56 Pltcta7^cJis Parallel Lives 

we realize what it was, may well fill us with un- 
bounded admiration. The Brutus of Plutarch was a 
character ready made to his hands. Here and there 
a melancholy grace, a touch of gentleness and of 
beauty has been added by him, but hardly more than 
this ; while if in Cassius the lines are deepened and 
the character more sharply delineated, this is all 
that Shakespeare has done, even as it was all that was 
needed. But it was otherwise with Antony. The 
Antony of history, of Plutarch himself, would have 
been no subject for poetry. Splendidly endowed by 
nature as he was, it would yet have been impossible 
to claim or create a sympathy for one so cruel, dyed 
so deeply in the noblest blood of Rome, the whole- 
sale plunderer of peaceful cities and provinces that 
he might squander their spoils on the vilest ministers 
of his pleasures ; himself of orgies so shameless, 
sunken in such a mire of- sin ; in whom met the 
ugliest features, and what one would have counted 
beforehand as the irreconcilable contradictions, of an 
Oriental despot and a Roman gladiator. And yet, 
transformed, we may say transfigured by that marvel- 
lous touch, the Antony of Shakespeare, if not the 
veritable Antony of history, has not so broken with 
him as not to be recognizable still. 

The play, starting from a late period of Antony's 
career, enables Shakespeare to leave wholly out of 
sight, and this with no violation of historic truth, 
much in the life of the triumvir which was wickedest 



Shakespeare s Antony 57 

and worst. For the rest, what was coarse is re- 
fined, what would take no colour of goodness is 
ignored, what had any fair side on which it could be 
showTi is shown on that side alone. He appears from 
the first as not himself, but as under the spells of that 
potent Eastern enchantress who had once held by 
these spells a Caesar himself There are followers 
who cleave to him in his lowest estate, even as there 
are fitful gleams and glimpses of generosity about 
him which explain this fidelity of theirs \ and when at 
the last we behold him standing amid the wreck of 
fortimes and the waste of gifts, all wrecked and 
wasted by himself, penetrated through and through 
with the infinite shame and sadness of such a close to 
such a life, the whole range of poetry offers no more 
tragical figure than he is, few that arouse a deeper 
pity ; while yet, ideal as this Antony of Shakespeare 
is, he is connected by innumerable subtle bands and 
finest touches with the real historical Antony, at once 
another and the same.^ 

I showed, before leaving Julius Ccesar, how much 
Shakespeare could on occasion make of a compara- 
tively little. It may be well, before parting from these 
plays, to bring before you one other passage, and this 
among the noblest w^hich he has, where he counts any 



^ There is an article bearing the title, Shakespear^s Antonius 
und Kleopatra und Plutarch^ s Biographie des Antonius in 
the fifth vokime of the Jahrhuh der Deutsche ft Shakespeare- 
Gesellschaft, but I have not seen it. 



58 PhttarcJis Parallel Lives 

such effort superfluous, where he does no more than 
put into verse what he finds ready prepared to his 
hand; so recognizes the finished completeness of 
Plutarch's narrative, that he makes no attempt to 
add anything to it, or to take anything from it. All are 
familiar with the death of Cleopatra, the setting of 
that ^ Eastern star,' as Shakespeare calls her j Augus- 
tus Caesar, whose suspicions of her intention to rob 
him of the chief trophy of his victory have been 
aroused too late, seeking in vain to baulk her of her 
purpose. These last things of her life are thus told 
by Plutarch : 

Her death was very sudden, for those whom Caesar sent 
unto her ran hither in all haste possible, and found the 
soldiers standing at the gate, mistrusting nothing, nor 
understanding of her death. But when they had opened 
the doors, they found Cleopatra stark dead, laid upon a 
bed of gold, attired and arrayed in her royal robes, and 
one of her two women, which was called Iras, dead at her 
feet : and her other woman (called Charmion) half dead, 
and trembling, trimming the diadem which Cleopatra 
wore upon her head. One of the soldiers seeing her, 
angrily said unto her : * Is that well done, Charmion.'^' 
* Very well,' said she again, ^ and meet for a princess de- 
scended from the race of so many noble kings : ' she said 
no more, but fell down dead hard by the bed.^ 

It would not be easy to mend this, the details of 
which may very well have been derived from the 
Memoirs of Cleopatra's physician, Olympus ; of which 



Antonius, 85. 



Shakespeare no Plagiarist 59 

Plutarch speaks, and which in all likelihood he used ; 
and Shakespeare is too consummate an artist to 
attempt to mend it. He is satisfied with absorbing 
into his verse all the grandeur of this passage — not 
omitting the angry expostulation of the Roman soldier, 

* Charmian, is this well done ? ' 

and the high-hearted answer of the Egy^ptian lady in 
waiting, * noble Charmian ' her mistress had called 
her but a little while before, and she does not belie 
her name — 

* It is well done, and fitting for a princess 
Descended of so many royal kings ; ' 

but he does not attempt to add anything of his own, 
as indeed there was no room for any such addition. 

A word or two more before we leave this subject 
of Shakespeare's obligations to Plutarch. Nowhere, 
as is abundantly clear, does our English poet make 
any pretence of conceaUng these; but adopts all, 
even to the very words of Sir Thomas North, with 
only such transposition and slight alteration as may 
be necessary to give to them a rhythmical cadence and 
flow. He is too rich, and too conscious that he is 
rich, to fear the charge of endeavouring to pass him- 
self off for such by the laying of his hands upon the 
riches of others. And here indeed is what properly 
determines whether an author should be adjudged by 
us as a plagiarist or not. The question is not, what 



6o PhctarcJis Parallel Lives 

he appropriates, but what proportion these appro- 
priations bear to that which he has of his own ; 
whether, if these were withdrawn and resumed by 
their rightful owners, they would leave him poor. If 
such would be the result, then, however few and small 
these may have been, we can count him no better 
than a daw, passing himself off for a peacock by the 
aid of feathers stuck into his plumage, and not pro- 
perly his own. If, on the other hand, all revindication 
by others of what is theirs would leave him essen- 
tially as rich as he was before, his position in the 
world of poetry is not affected by the bringing home 
to him of any number of these appropriations. We 
need not fear to allow Shakespeare to be tried by this 
rule ; and we can only admire that noble confidence 
in his own resources which left him free without 
scruple to adopt and to turn to his own uses what- 
ever he anywhere found which was likely to prove 
serviceable to the needs of his art. 

But if among all our poets he who in himself is the 
richest of all owes the largest debt to Plutarch, there 
are others who are indebted to him as well. Thus com- 
mentators on Paradise Lost are generally satisfied with 
referring to a passage in Thucydides as that which 
Milton must have had in his mind in that magnificent 
description of the army of fallen Spirits advancing to 

battle : 

^ Anon they move 
In perfect phalanx, to the Dorian rnood 



Plutarch and Milton 6 1 

Of flutes and soft recorders ; such as raised 
To highth of noblest temper heroes old, 
Arming to battle, and instead of rage 
Deliberate valour breathed, firm and unmoved 
With dread of death to flight or foul retreat ; 
Nor wanting power to mitigate and swage 
With solemn touches troubled thoughts, and chase 
Anguish and doubt and fear and sorrow and pain 
From mortal or immortal minds.' ^ 

Any scholar, however, referring to the words of 
Thucydides,^ will perceive that merely the fact of the 
Spartans so marching to battle, and by aid of music 
keeping their ranks, is there stated, and nothing of 
the solemn influences, composing and elevating, which 
this music exercised on their minds ; wherein the real 
grandeur of the passage consists. I cannot doubt 
that Milton had before him, not indeed North — for 
no word indicates this, and Milton was not likely to 
read a Greek author in other than the original — but 
Plutarch, who, in his Life of Lycurgus, writes thus 
of the Spartans : — 

Afterwards when their army was set in battle array, even 
in the face of the enemies, the king did straight sacrifice 
a goat unto the gods, and forthwith commanded all his 
soldiers to put their garlands of flowers on their heads, 
and willed that the pipes should sound the song of Castor, 
at the noise and tune whereof he himself began first to 
march forward : so that it was a marvellous pleasure, and 



P, L, I. 549-559. - Thucydides, v. 70. 



62 Plittarclis Parallel Lives 

likewise a dreadful sight, to see the whole battle march 
together in order, at the sound of their pipes, and never 
to break their pace, nor confound their ranks, nor to be 
dismayed or amazed themselves, but to go on quietly and 
joyfully at the sound of their pipes, to hazard themselves 
even to death. For it is likely that such courages are 
not troubled with much fear, nor yet overcome with much 
fury : but rather they have an assured constancy and 
valiantness in good hope, as those which are backed with 
the assisting favour of the gods.^ 

But not in times past only, — to this day Plutarch 
yields hints on which poets speak. There are fountains 
of inspiration in him which age has done nothing to 
seal or to draw dry. Many oT my hearers are 
familiar with Browning's beautiful poem, whose name 
Balaustion^ or Wild Pomegranate Flower, may also 
be beautiful in Greek, though it is certainly not 
beautiful in English ; and these will no doubt remem- 
ber the forty or fifty lines in which the modem poet 
sets forth to us the passionate love of the Sicilians for 
the poetry of Euripides, and the manifold ways in 
which such poor Athenian captives as had survived 
the great Syracusan catastrophe, if only they could 
repeat any portions of this poetry, obtained favour 
with their Sicilian masters, alleviations of their cap- 
tivity at the least, and sometimes an entire release 
from it. These lines are drawn almost word for word 
from the last chapter but one of the Life of Nicias.^ 
You will recognize how closely Browning clings to his 



* LycurguSj 22. ^ AlciaSj 29. 



Plutarch and Browning 63 

Greek original, how entirely he has borrowed the 
framework of his poem from it, though he has filled it 
in as only one who was himself a poet could do, when 
I quote the words in which Plutarch concludes this 
matter. Having spoken of all these favours which 
Euripides obtained for those who could repeat his 
poetry, he goes on : 

And this is not to be marvelled at, weighing the report 
made of a ship of the city of Caunus, that on a time being 
chased in thither [that is, into Syracuse] by pirates, think- 
ing to save themselves within their ports, could not at 
the first be received, but had repulse. Howbeit, being 
demanded whether they could sing any of Euripides' songs, 
and answering that they could, were straight suffered to 
enter and come in. 

It need hardly be observed that in the words of 
Milton's sonnet, 

^and the repeated air 
Of sad Electra's poet had the power 
To save the Athenian walls from ruin bare/ 

is an allusion to another event of somewhat similar 
character, recorded in Plutarch's Life of Lysander.^ 

Nor is Browning the only poet of our own age who 
has dug in this inexhausted and inexhaustible mine. 
Going back a little, we may, I think, with perfect con- 
fidence afl[irm that Wordsworth's stately poem, Dio7i 
by name, would never have been written but for the 
life of this liberator of Sicily as by Plutarch recorded for 



Lysander, 15* 



64 PlutarcJis Parallel Lives , 

us. The modern poem roots itself in the story as told 
by him, draws all its life-blood therefrom, gathers up 
into one brief consummate whole what the Greek 
biographer has more at large set forth. I move not 
the question here whether Plutarch may not have 
presented Dion to us in too favourable a light, as 
certainly he has presented Brutus, whsm he pairs 
with him — Wordsworth, who is dependent on him, 
doing the same. The true and abiding interest of 
the poem remains unaffected by any conclusion on 
this point at which we may arrive ; and the * princely 
Dion ' of our English poet will live as long as stateliest 
thoughts clothing themselves in stateliest words, and 
the solemn tragedy of a doom such as his — the doom, 
that is, of a good man who has made one great moral 
mistake — can awake any responsive echo in the hearts 
of men. 

Wordsworth was not a great reader, but I track him 
again as a student of Plutarch, when in one of his 
* Sonnets to Liberty ^ he alludes to a Roman chief, who, 

^ sick of strife 
And bloodshed, longed in quiet to be laid 
In some green island of the western main.' 

The reference is here to Sertorius, one of the few 
loveable heroes of Rome, and one who, cherishing 
such a longing as this, cherished a longing which very 
few Roman hearts would have been capable even of 
conceiving. The passage is too long to quote, but is 
wonderfully illustrative of the tender character of the 



Ser tortus 65 



man. Entangled in those hideous confusions which 
marked the final break-up of the Republic, and 
struggling gi'andly, but hopelessly, in Spain, for what 
in his judgment might still be saved of law and order 
in the State, some sea-captains brought him tidings of 
certain fair islands only a few days' sail from the coast 
of Spain, where (to use the words of Plutarch), ' the air 
was never extreme, which for rain had a little silver 
dew, which of themselves, and without labour, bore all 
pleasant fruits to their happy dwellers, till it seemed 
to him that these could be no other than the Fortunate 
Islands, the very Elysian Fields ; ' and we learn 
further how he, ' having report of these islands, upon 
a certain desire now to live quietly out of t^Tanny and 
wars, had straight a marvellous longing to go dwell 
there ;' ^ so setting his heart upon this, and seeming 
so prepared to carry out his purpose, that many 
of his allies, men of blood, given altogether to war 
and rapine, forsook him.^ 

I have mainly dealt with the strong, but it would 
not be difficult to bring out the weak sides also of 
these biographies. Many have done this in times 
past; and there are some doing it still. Covering 
as they do immense spaces of time, and entering into 



* We have an echo of this, but with a very distinct falsetto 
running through it all, in the 1 6th Epode of Horace ; * arva, 
beata Petamus arva, divites et insulas,' <S:c., 4 1 -6 7. 

2 Sertorius^ 8. 

F 



66 PhitarcJis Parallel Lives 

a multitude of details, it would require but little labour 
to make a formidable list of the inaccuracies, the 
repetitions of the same story in different ways, the 
small contradictions between one Z^J^and another, 
the errors in dates, names, and places, the imperfect 
apprehension of Roman customs and institutions 
which they contain. Critical Plutarch was not in the 
sense in which Thucydides or Polybius was critical, 
much less according to the claims of modern historic 
science ; but the freest admission of all this leaves his 
proper glory unimpaired and undiminished. More- 
over, in this matter itself there has been no slight 
exaggeration. Heeren, after a careful examination of 
the sources from which Plutarch derived his informa- 
tion, and the use which he made of them, does not 
hesitate to affirm that the authorities which he used , 
were generally the best to be had ; that he used them 
intelligently and honestly ;- that his standard of what 
an historian should be was high ; and that for the 
most part he only fell short of this as every man in 
this world of imperfections must fall short of a high 
ideal which he sets before him. ^ 

Plutarch, as is well known, pairs his Lives^ in each 
case a Greek with a Roman, and like with like, as 
seems best to him; though sometimes, it must be 
owned, the points of resemblance which explain the 



* See his Essay, Ueber deji historischen Wet'th der Biographien 
Plutarch^ 5. 



Lives not always well matched 67 

bringing of two lives together are of a very superficial 
kind, as for instance, when he matches Pelopidas and 
Marcellus, seemingly on little other ground save 
that both were slain, venturing into dangers which, 
as officers in chief command of armies, they had no 
business to affiront ; or Alcibiades and Coriolanus, as 
both having died violent deaths in exile. Others he 
pairs with more reason, orator with orator, Demo- 
sthenes with Cicero ; the greatest with the greatest, 
Alexander with Caesar ; here and there too there is a 
fine insight into the innermost meaning and aim of 
certain lives, as when Agis and Cleomenes are set over 
against the two Gracchi; but these parallelisms, though 
they had their purpose for him, rarely add anything to 
the value of the Lives for us. Montaigne indeed speaks 
of them * ' as the most admirable part of his work ; ' 
but from this judgment I must altogether dissent ; and 
this characteristic of the Lives, namely, that for the 
most part they go in pairs, I have only noticed for the 
purpose of making the following remarks. Some have 
charged the biographer that in his summings up he 
shows, whether consciously or unconsciously, undue 
favour to his own nation ; having, moreover, made 
this the easier by a want of perfect fairness in the pair- 
ing of those whom he thus set over against one another. 
This charge, I am bold to say, is altogether without 
foundation. A meaner man might have been tempted 



* Essays, vi. 32. 
Fa 



68 Plutai^cKs Parallel Lives 

to run into the opposite extreme, might have sought 
to curry favour with the dominant race by unduly 
exalting what was theirs, and depressing that which 
was his own. Doubtless there were Greek sycophants 
jin abundance quite ready to have done this; one 
of these inventing, about this time, the title for Rome 
of OvpavoTToXtc, or The Heaven-City,^ a title which 
reads strangely in the light which Juvenal and Tacitus 
cast on the things which were perpetrated there. 
But there is as little trace in Plutarch of the one un- 
fairness as of the other. If he loved Greece and his 
Greek heroes the best, Rome and her institutions, 
and the virtues by which she had attained to her pre- 
eminence, and the men who had helped her to this, 
^filled him with a continual marvel and admiration. 
He had ever an open eye for her points of superiority, 
and was very free in acknowledging these ; as, for 
instance, the reverent accuracy of the great in en of 
Rome, and of the Romans in general, in the perform- 
ance of divine offices, as set over against the com- 
parative slovenliness and irreverence of his own 
countrymen, — the subject being one to which he recurs 
again and again. ^ One who has excellent right to 
speak has borne witness to the moral dignity of the 
man, the just weights and balances which, in making 
these comparisons, he never fails to use,^ 



* AthencBUS^ I, 36. 

2 Numa^ 14 ; Marcellus, 5 ; ^milius Faulus^ 3; Coriolanus^ 25. 

* Merivale, History of the Romans^ vol. vii. p. 457. 



His hnpartiality 69 

Yet with all this, it is no cosmopolitan indifference 
which enables him to weigh Greek and Roman in 
such equal balances ; for he is no citizen of the world 
in the sense of having ceased to regard one particular 
land with an aftection and devotion greater than that 
which he feels for every other. Plutarch remains ever 
a Greek, a Theban still more than a Greek, — as 
such amusingly indignant with Herodotus, whose 
' malignity* he denounces at length for recording so 
plainly some ignoble passages in Theban history, — and 
a Chaeronean still more than a Theban. 

Other accusations have been brought against him. 
He has been charged with painting too much en beau, 
with too large a toleration for the faults, and sometimes 
even for the crimes, of those the story of whose lives 
he is relating.^ The charge, so far as there is any 
truth in it, must be taken with important qualifica- 
tions. Of the men who, as far as we can see, belong 
altogether to the kingdom of darkness, and of their 
evil moral conditions, he is not tolerant at all. He 
pourtrays them as they were, and in colours as dark 
as they deserve. But it is different with those who 
belong in part to the kingdom of darkness and in 
part to the kingdom of light ; in whom good and evil, 
light and darkness, are struggling. He does, no 



' Abbing (Obss. de Indole Plutarchi in Scriptis conspi^ud^ 
1839) : Plutarchi in historia veri studio inter alia maxime obfuit 
summa ipsius humanitas. Compare Kremer, Inqidsitio in con^ 
siliurn et modtwi qtw Flutarchus scrip it Vitas Parallelas^ 1 841. 



PlutarcJis Parallel Lives 



doubt, make the most of what good he can find in 
them, and the least of the evil to which he cannot 
altogether close his eyes ; and he thus defends the 
course which he has taken : 

Like as when we will have a passing fair face drawn 
and lively counterfeited, and that hath an excellent good 
grace withal, yet some manner of blemish or imperfection 
in it, we will not allow the painter to leave it out alto- 
gether, nor yet too curiously to shew it, because the one 
would deform the counterfeit, and the other make it very 
unlikely. Even so, because it is a hard thing (or to say 
better, peradventure impossible), to describe a man, whose 
life should altogether be innocent and perfect, we must 
first study to write his virtues at large, and thereby seek 
perfectly to represent the truth, even as the life itself. 
But where by chance we find certain faults and errors, 
proceeding either of passion of the mind, by necessity of 
the time, or state of the commonwealth, they are rather 
to be thought imperfections of virtue not altogether ac- 
complished, than any purposed wickedness, proceeding 
of vice, or certain malice. Which we shall not need too 
curiously to express in our history, but rather to pass 
them lightly over, of reverent shame to the mere frailty 
of man's nature, which cannot bring forth a man of such 
virtue and perfection, but there is ever some imperfection 
in him.^ 

To my mind, the most serious defect in Plutarch's 
Lives is his frequent failure rightly to apprehend, or 
at any rate to make his readers rightly to apprehend, 
a political situation, this fault naturally showing itself 

* Cijjioii. 2, 



Phctarclis weak points 7 1 

more strongly in his Koman Lives than in his Greek. 
One who already understands the times of Marius 
and Sulla will get vast instruction from his several 
Lives of these, will clothe with flesh and blood what 
would else, in some parts, have been the mere skeleton 
of a story ; but I am bold to say no one would under- 
stand those times from him. The suppression of the 
Catilinarian conspiracy was the most notable event 
in the life of Cicero ; but one rises from Plutarch's 
Life with only the faintest impression of what that 
conspiracy meant. Or take his Lives of the Gracchi. 
Admirable as in many respects these are, much as we 
are debtors to him here for important facts, whereot 
otherwise we should have been totally ignorant, 
few, I think, would aflirm that he at aU. plants 
them in a position for understanding that great revo- 
lution which is connected with their names. 

This lack of insight into the true significance of 
political events which he is relating, is sometimes 
astounding. How otherwise can we qualify the 
rapture with which he records the well-known pro- 
clamation of the 'liberty' of Greece at the Isthmian 
games by the Philhellene Roman commander, Titus 
Flamininus ; this liberty delighting him the more from 
the fact that it had been won, as he states, though I 
know not how he can reconcile this statement with the 
facts, without the expense of a single drop of Grecian 
blood ? He at least should have known that a liberty 
which was thus give7i was no true possession, would 



72 Phctar cits Parallel Lives 

be withdrawn again whenever this suited the con- 
venience, or fell in with the caprice, of the donor. 
Wordsworth in his noble sonnet — 

^ A Roman master stands on Grecian ground/ 

suggested by the same fact, has more rightly judged 
the worth, or rather the worthlessness of a gift such 
as this — 

^ A gift of that which is not to be given 
By all the blended powers of earth and heaven.' 

Yet, after all, what is this fault which we thus find 
with Plutarch but a saying in other words what 
all who have any insight into the matter have ever 
freely admitted, namely, that the political is the weak 
aspect of these Lives ^ and the ethical the strong ? 



Other Writings of Phttarch 73 



LECTURE III. 

PLUTARCH' S MORALS, 

The singular merit of the Parallel Lives, and their 
immense popularity, has thrown somewhat into the 
background the other writings of Plutarch; and 
doubtless it is his Lives by which he mainly lives, 
and on which he must rest his chief claim to deserve 
to live. And yet, whatever prominence and prece- 
dence we may accord to them, they never can be 
thoroughly understood, what they aimed at and what 
they accomplished, justified in what they are and in 
what they are not, until we know something more 
than those Lives themselves tell us of the spirit 
which animated the writer, of the points of view, 
moral and religious, from which he contemplated, 
not this man's life or the other's, but the whole life of 
man. Nor is it too much to affirm that of the two halves 
of Plutarch's writings, each constitutes a complement 
of the other ; the one half setting forth to us, and, 
so far as this was possible, from ideal points of 
view, what the ancient world had accomplished in the 
world of action, and the other what, in like manner, it 
had accomplished in the world of thought. 



74 PhUarcJis Morals 

The works of his to which I must now turn, which 
thus complete his Lives^ and often supply a key to 
these, would abundantly reward a far closer study 
than they have commonly obtained. In Gibbon's 
great preliminary sketch of the Caesarian world, refer- 
ences to them, as has been already noted, are few or 
none ; while, so far as I can judge, they have not been 
very largely used by later English historians of the 
epoch to which they more immediately belong. And 
yet a distinguished Dutch scholar, Daniel Wyttenbach, 
no dull plodder, but a man of various accomplish- 
ments, gave four-and-twenty years of his life to the 
editing of these ; at the same time laying out his work on 
so grand a scheme, and with so large a critical appa- 
ratus, that he left the book incomplete at his death. 

The circle of Plutarch's writings which go by the 
common name of Moralia is immense ; though few of 
them are long, and many of them very brief. They are 
miscellaneous in their character; while being some 
antiquarian, some physical, but in the main ethical, 
they correspond sufficiently well with the name which 
they bear. You will better understand the region in 
which they move when I have named the titles which 
some of them bear ; as for example : — On the Profit 
which a man may derive from his Enemies ; — How to 
discern between a Flatterer and a Friend ; — On praising 
on^s-self; — How a man may know whether he is advan- 
cing in Virtue ; — On the Delays in the Divine J^ustice; 
— On Oracles which have ceased to give replies ; — On 



Titles of Treatises 75 

Chattering^ or On Litemperate Speech^ as Holland 
renders it; — On Curiosity; — On Superstition; 
— O71 Unseemly a7id Naughty Bashf nines s ; — On the 
Familiar Spirit of Socrates ; — On Isis and Osiris ; — 
Precepts of Wedlock, Of the treatises which I have 
named, some, as you will gather from their titles, are 
purely ethical ; while in others the theological interest 
largely mingles with the ethical, or altogether prevails 
over it. 

Of these Moralia we possess an early translation . 
this too, like Sir Thomas North's translation of the 
Lives ^ a most important monument of our early 
English, but of this some quarter of a century later — 
having been published in 1603 ; though, unUke the 
Lives^ it has never since been reprinted. It is wanting, 
too, in that interest which the other derives from having 
served as the channel of communication between the 
minds of Plutarch and Shakespeare. This version 
is the work of Philemon Holland, a physician of 
Coventry, who occupied himself much with the ren- 
dering of various Greek and Latin authors into English. 
To him we owe a translation of Pliny's Natural 
History^ of Livy, of Xenophon's Cyropcedia^ of Sue- 
tonius, of Ammianus Marcellinus, and of Camden's 
Britannia, His translations constitute a part of ' the 
library of Dulness ' in the Dtmciad : I am unable to 
see with what justice, since none of the books on 
which he has expended his pains are themselves dull, 
and certainly he has not infused into them a dulness 



76 Phttarclis Morals 

not their own. Southey, then, in my judgment shows 
a much truer appreciation of them than Pope had 
done, when in The Doctor he makes two of these books, 
the Moralia being one of them, to find place among 
the select few which Daniel Dove cared to find room 
for on his shelves. These volumes have already 
yielded something, but are capable of yielding much 
more, in the way of English words and idioms, un- 
registered hitherto, to the compilers of a Dictionary 
which should be indeed a Thesaurus totius Aiiglicitatis. 
We may note, in the first instance, as used by him 
and forming part of his vocabulary, an immense 
number of French words, which, having offered them- 
selves as candidates for admission into the English lan- 
guage, have been obliged in the end to withdraw their 
claims — words, therefore, which for us now are French, 
and French only. I quote a fewr'baine,' * baton,' 

* to cass,' ' ecurie,' ' livraison,' * mot,' * mur,' ' ouvert,' 
'pantofle,' ' pourprises,' ^propice,' ^primices,' *scan- 
tillon,' * sacre,' ' volant.' He has himself offered as 
candidates for admission some Greek words ; as for 
instance ^ acroames/ *kumbix ' (dfxfii^), ^polypragmon,' 
which the language has in like manner declined to 
make its own. 

We note in him further, as in Sir Thomas North, 
many words still only imperfectly naturalized ; such as, 
though adopted into the language, have not yet re- 
nounced their Greek or Latin terminations : thus 

* heliotropium,' ' hypotenusa,' * praedicatum,' ' psal- 



Hollands Translation 77 

tenon,' ' rhythmus/ ' spondaeus/ ^ trochseus; ' the plural 
sometimes betraying the incomplete character of this 
adoption, where the singular would have failed to do 
so ; as when he writes * mussea ' and not ' musaeums,' 
' sphinges,' and not * sphinxes,' ^ idese ' and not ' ideas,' 
' chori ' and not * choruses,' with other similar forms. 

Many words now obsolete we meet in this 
volume as still in familiar use ; for there is nothing 
in the book to make us suspect that Holland 
wilfully affected the archaic ; as * to baddle,' * to 
dade,' ' to frapple,' ' to maffle,' ^ maffler,' ' pregnable/ 
only surviving in ' impregnable,' ' to thrumble.' It is 
curious, too, to find in him some compound epithets 
which we generally ascribe to quite a later period of 
the language, as ^ foulmouthed,' ' lightfingered,' ' strait- 
laced,' ' closefisted,' and the like. It is from this 
translation that any quotations which I may think 
desirable to make will be drawn. 

It has been observed already that the age in which 
Plutarch lived was in some sort an age of moral 
reaction, one in which vigorous attempts were made, 
and from various quarters — these too not wholly in- 
effectual — to arrest the advances of a corruption that 
threatened to sweep away all the barriers which 
hitherto had kept it within bounds. We know that 
these attempts did only very partially succeed ; we can 
understand how in the nature and necessity of things 
their ultimate failure was inevitable. The moral 



78 PhttarcJis Morals 

bankruptcy of the heathen world may have been by 
them deferred, but it was not averted. Not philo- 
sophy, not a resuscitation of faith in the gods of 
Hellas, not the bringing in and combining with this the 
Oriental worships and wisdom, not the reviving and 
quickening of anything good which the old world pos- 
sessed already, nor yet all of these togeth'Br, but Chris- 
tianity, newly born from above, was to regenerate and 
save society. Yet for all this, it would be a serious mis- 
take to underrate and to despise these well-meant efforts, 
though a fault less serious, it may be, than to exalt 
them overmuch, or to count that they rendered, or could 
have rendered, superfluous the bringing in of a purer 
hope and a better faith. 

With all its weaknesses and shortcomings, the 
school or lecture-room was the best and highest which, 
as a moral teaching power, the heathen world at this 
time could boast — the nearest approach to the Chris- 
tian pulpit which it owned. It is impossible to resist the 
conclusion that a very large amount of genuine and 
healthy work was wrought by those who laid them- 
selves out, by the use of such helps as the best wisdom 
of the world at their command afforded, to serve their 
generation; that many were by them enabled to live 
their lives after a far higher and nobler fashion than 
else they would have attained. Saying this, I do not 
shut my eyes to all which was wanting here ; as, on 
the part of those who spoke, the ^ mouth and wisdom ' 
directly given from above ; with a deficiency too exactly 



The Lecher e-room 79 

corresponding to this on their part who heard ; while 
even at the very best the teacher addressed, and 
could hope to influence, only a select and cultured 
minority, endowed with leisure, and not without some 
tincture of learning. There was indeed an attempt at 
a more popular propaganda on the part of some 
among the later Cynics, who in their good and in their 
evil remind us so continually of the Mendicant Orders 
of the Middle Ages ; but these efforts of theirs were too 
few and isolated to count for much. 

Freely admitting, then, that the sphere of these ac- 
tivities was comparatively a narrow one, yet within 
this there were many willing to guide and to teach, 
and more desirous to be guided and taught. I am 
persuaded that we very inadequately realize to 
ourselves the craving for what one might venture 
to call ' spiritual direction,' borrowing this term from 
the later language of the Christian Church, which 
was felt at the time by very many, the eagerness with 
which the spiritual director was sought out, and the 
absolute obedience to his injunctions which he found. 
Young men, desirous to order their lives according 
to some higher scheme, others, too,of maturerage, who 
had the same aspiration, but who, from one cause 
or another, were unable to think out for themselves 
a satisfying rule of life, placed themselves in a relation 
of learners and pupils to some distinguished philo- 
sopher, attended his lectures, sought more special 
help and guidance from him in private and familiar 



8o PhUarcJis Morals 

intercourse. It would be difficult to find a more 
tender and attractive picture of the relation in which 
such learner and teacher might stand to one another 
than that which Persius gives of his relations to 
Comutus. ^ Instructive too, as shewingthe extraordinary- 
development which this spiritual direction, according to 
the lights which men possessed, had assumed, are the 
Letters of Seneca in reply to those of his youthful friend 
Lucilius. It is plain, from more than one of these, that 
the spiritual director was more embarrassed than de- 
lighted by the continual reference w^hich was made to 
him for guidance in each single detail of life, and would 
fain have seen some greater self-reliance on the part of 
his pupil 'y just as Plutarch warns young men that in 
the end they must grow out of their own root, and 
not out of that of any other ; that it must not fare 
with them as with those who, going to kindle a light 
at another man's fire, are so well pleased with the 
warmth and blaze, that they sit down and tarry by it, 
quite forgetting that it was not for this, but to kindle 
their own torch, that they came thither. ^ 

There were other ways too, in which men sought to 
satisfy this same longing after some sort of wiser guid- 
ance than their own. Many a Roman noble entertained 
in his house a philosopher of his own,^ who would 



> Sat, V. 21-51. 
2 De Red. Rat. Aud. 18. 

^ Philosophus suus (Seneca, De Tranq. An, 14 ; Ad 
Marc. 4). 



Philosophers and Sophists, 8 1 

probably be at once the instructor of his children, and 
his own and his family's moral director and adviser. 
We have frequent references or allusions to these, 
' the domestic chaplains of heathendom,' as Professor 
Lightfoot has happily called them, in the writings of 
the time. Thus Plutarch relates as the most 
natural thing in the world, that Cato, retiring into the 
country for a little repose, should take with him 
books and philosophers.^ Nor were these last merely 
fair-weather companions. It is everywhere assumed 
as a matter of course that where there is sorrow or 
trial to be borne by one with whom the philosopher 
stands in any relation, there he will be with admoni- 
tion and comfort — with his commonplaces on life 
and death, which, if always old, are yet also always 
new. Thus Plutarch writing to Apollonius, who has 
lately lost a son, takes for granted that he will long 
since have expected to hear from him or to see him ; 
and proceeds to account for the delay. ^ 

We must not confound with these philosophers the 
sophists ; this old name coming once more into use 
and into some sort of honour j even as those who bore 
this name now multiplied greatly through the whole 
Greek and Roman world. It is true that these sophists, 
or rhetoricians, and the philosophers had much ex- 



' Cato Minoi', 20. 

^ ConsoL ad Apollon. i ; compare De Sttperst. 7 ; Cato 
Minor, 67 ; Tacitus, A^inal. xvi. 34. 

G 



82 PhUarcIis Morals, 

temally in common. They alike used, with very rare 
exceptions, the Greek language, the lecture-room, and 
the lecture. They were thus exposed to many of the 
same temptations, above all, to vanity and to the 
seeking to make a show of themselves. But the 
sophist proper of this time — for I do not want to open 
the question of what the earlier were -was a mere 
dealer in words, most often a seller of them ; did not 
profess to be anything higher ; made no pretence of 
undertaking to improve men, but only to please, 
and if possible to astonish them, with the feats as of 
an intellectual acrobat. In a letter of the younger 
Pliny, we have a very curious account of the perform- 
ances of one of these who had just come to Rome, 
of the enthusiasm and astonishment which his per- 
formances excited. ^ It may easily be supposed that 
men who made this unworthy traffic with the sacred 
gift of speech did not escape the moral penalties 
which are sure to avenge such abuse. Their vanity 
was portentous. They got themselves up for the 
lecture as for a show ; ^ peacocks,* Dio Chrysostom 
calls them, for their ostentation and their pride. ^ Then 
too, falling in as they did with the inclinations of so 
many, who were eager to be amused, but did not care 



* Ep. ii. 3 ; compare Juvenal, Sat. iii. 74. 

2 Orat. 12. Compare the Due de Broglie, VEglise et 
r Empire Roifiain, part 2. vol. i. pp. 142-150, and M. Malta, 
Des Sophisies Grecs de t Empire Romain^ in the Rruue Contem- 
poraine^ April, 1857. 



Vanity of the Sophists. 83 

to be improved, they were everywhere welcomed with 
boundless applause, of which yet it seemed impos- 
sible to them that they could ever receive enough ; and 
we have lively descriptions of the lecturer — how, 
unsatisfied with all which he had obtained, and as one 
still greedy for more, he made, when his discourse was 
concluded, the circuit of his hearers, to extort from 
them some further tributes of admiration. ^ How,' he 
would demand, ^ did you find me to-day ? ' ^ Never so 
well.' ^ And that description of Pan and the Nymphs? ' 
' Incomparable ! ' And then we are told how he ex- 
pected — and often not in vain — that a crowd of his 
hearers, including, if possible, the principal persons 
in the city, should escort him through the streets 
to his lodging, proclaiming his merits, and kissing the 
hem of his garment as they went. 

It would be only fair to these spoilt children of their 
age to say that there was no affectation on their parts 
of despising money, or of living lives a whit stricter 
or purer than those of the rest of the world. With the 
philosophers it was otherwise. They both taught a 
higher rule of life, and professed to fashion their own 
lives thereby. As may be supposed, they became 
thus the mark of abundant abuse, deserved and un- 
deserved. Besides those charges of vanity and 
display, to which in common with the sophists they 
were obvious, there were graver, and, so far as they 
were true, far more damaging accusations which 
they did not escape ; as that their lives and their 

G 2 



84 PhdarcJis Morals. 

teaching were often at very ill accord with one 
another ; that, denouncing the love of riches, they 
haunted rich men's palaces,^ and showed themselves 
ignobly eager for gifts, were content, like the ' tame 
Levite ' of more modem times, to endure any indig- 
nities, if only they could secure a place in some 
wealthy establishment Lucian is nev^r weary of 
holding them up on charges such as these to ridicule 
and contempt, 2 and Juvenal, who makes still darker 
accusations against them, to hatred.^ Let it be freely 
granted that these charges were not always without 
truth. ^ Many, no doubt, wore the philosopher's mantle 
and the philosopher's beard, but only as the false 
prophets the rough garment, to deceive ; ^ some may 
have made shameful abuse of the opportunities which 
their position and the confidence with which they 
were treated afforded. But granting all this, we may 
be bold to say that neither all nor nearly all in these 
accusations was true, the world at that day, as at this, 
having an unlimited supply of calumny at command 
for ^ideologues,' for all who have the impertinence 
to set up a loftier standard than its own, who profess 

' Aulus Gellius, xiiL 23, 2. 

* Thus see his De Mercede Conductis, passim, and Friedlander, 
Sittengeschichte Roms^ vol. iii. p. 592. 

" Sat. L 109-111. 

* Thus it does not seem in the least to surprise Pliny to find 
in his province a philosopher who has been condemned to the 
mines for forgery {Ep. x. 67 ; of. Tacitus, Annal, xvi. 32 ; 
Quintilian, Inst. Or at. Procem. 13-15). 

* Zech. xiii. 4 \ compare Aulus Gellius, ix. 2. 



Foibles of Lechirers. 85 

to frame their owti lives, or who seek to frame the 
lives of others, according to a higher law.* 

But letting these graver imputations rest, it is impos- 
sible to read Plutarch's admirable essay On the right 
Manner of Hearings without acknowledging that some 
of the mischiefs, which could not have failed to be at 
work where a sophist was displaying himself, had con- 
trived not seldom to insinuate themselves where a 
philosopher was teaching ; that here, too, were faults 
and foibles on the side of the speaker, while often- 
times the hearers were only too ready to play into, 
and by their manner of hearing to give a larger 
development to these. At the same time it will be 
only fair to remember that something not altogether 
unlike this is not wholly imknown in auguster places 
than the lecture-room of the heathen philo- 
sopher, and on the part of some who have a more 
solemn message than ever he had to deliver ; while 
yet, even while we are fully aware of all this, we do 
not therefore conclude that the Christian pulpit is 
an imposture, and those who fill it mountebanks and 
cheats. We may fairly show, in judging of others, the 
same equity of forbearance which we claim for our- 
selves. 

Certainly some of the demonstrations of admiration 



* Seneca {Ep. 123) tells us what the world said about them, 
and how it counselled its own to regard them : * Istos tristes et 
superstitiosos, alienee vitae censores, suae hostes, publicos paeda- 
gogos, assis ne feceris.' 



86 Phitarclis Morals. 

which were expected on one side, and granted on the 
other, were curious ; as when Plutarch describes, after 
some bravura passage, the whole audience rising from 
their seats, waving their garments in the air, and 
swearing by all the gods, and as men swear in a court of 
justice, that they had never heard anything to equal 
it; how, dismissing as tame and used up, the old 
manifestations of approval, such as had greeted a So- 
crates and a Plato — * Good,' ' True,' \ Well said,' — they 
had substituted new ones for these : ' Divine ' (6£iu)q), 
* Unapproachable' (dTrpoo-trwg), ^Inspired' {dEO(j>opi]T(i)c), 
with much more of the like kind. That he set himself 
against all such clamorous and indecent outbreaks of 
applause, it is needless to mention. * You may be 
sure,' he says, ' where such find place, that the speaker 
is nought, and the hearers are nought ; that it is not so 
much a sage who discourses as a player who performs. 
The true philosopher addresses himself to the 
conscience, and where the conscience is reached, 
there is no room nor inclination for explosions of ad- 
miration such as these.' His own lectures, judging of 
them by the treatises, which, no doubt, must ver}^ nearly 
represent them, were no showy declamations, no 
fightings in the air against imaginary foes, but earnest 
efforts, as of a spiritual physician, to heal the hurts of 
men's souls. ^ Beginning for the most part with a 



* There is a very pretty essay on Plutarch, contemplated from 
this point of view, in the Revue des Deux Mondes^ vol. Ixxi. pp. 
425-454, under the title, Un M^decin de VAme chez les Pdiem, 



Sympathy with the Young 87 

subtle diagnosis of the diseased moral condition 
against which he made war, they rarely concluded 
without some suggestions, testifying often a profound 
knowledge of the human heart, as to the best means 
whereby a virtuous habit might be implanted, or a 
vicious one might be weakened, and gradually, if not 
all at once, overcome. 

There was much in him which evidently fitted him 
for the office of such a spiritual adviser as we have 
just described. Thus there breathes through all his 
wTitings a profound sympathy with the young, exposed, 
as he saw them, to all and more than all the tempta- 
tions which at this day beset their paths, and with helps 
so far fewer than are now at command for the resisting 
of these. He ever lays himself out for them, if so be 
that the voice of a divine philosophy might deaden and 
drowTi in their hearts those songs of the Sirens, so 
sweet and yet so deadly, which were ever seeking to 
lure them to their ruin. Thus listen to his words 
addressed to a young man just passing from boyhood 
into early manhood. Nobler have seldom been uttered 
concerning that obedience to the truth, in which, and 
in which alone, true freedom resides : 

The wiser sort, and such as have wit indeed, repute not 
the passage and change from childhood to man^s estate 
an absolute deliverance and freedom from commandment 
and subjection, but an exchange only of the commander ; 
for that their life, instead either of a mercenary hireling 
or some master bought with a piece of money, who was 
wont to govern it in their nonage and minority, taketh 



88 Plutarch! s Morals, 

then a divine and heavenly guide to conduct it, unto which 
they that yield themselves obedient are alone to be reputed 
free and at liberty. For they alone live as they would 
who have learned to will that which they should : 
whereas, if our actions and affections both be disordinate 
and not ruled by reason, the liberty of our free will is 
small, slender, and feeble, yea, and intermingled for the 
most part with much repentance and remorse.^ 

Surely what is here uttered is capable of being trans- 
lated into a higher language, of being set to a higher 
key \ has actually been so translated and set by St. Paul 
at the beginning, of the fourth chapter of his Epistle to 
the Galatians ; and may be so translated by all who 
read heathen authors, not to glory over them and to 
despise them on account of the truth which they had 
not, but to thank God and to honour them for the truth 
which they had. 

At the same time, his was not a starched prim- 
ness, which could make no allowances, which could 
hope for nothing good if there was the presence of 
any evil. The soil which bears no crop at all, either 
good or bad, we may fitly despair of it ; but the soil 
which brings forth a rich luxuriance of weeds — for this 
we may well hope that, duly tended and dressed, it 
will justify the patience of those who have waited for 
the precious fruit which it should one day bear. On 
this matter, and above all on the long-suffering of 
God in thus biding men's time, he has an eloquent 
passage, one of many on the same theme : 

» De RecL Rat. Atui, i. 



His Philosophy. 89 

Great natures and high minds can bring forth no mean 
matters. Like as therefore he who altogether unskilful of 
husbandry maketh no reckoning at all of ground which 
he seeth full of rough bushes and thickets, beset with 
savage trees, wherein also there be many wild beasts ; 
but, contrariwise, an expert husband, and one who hath 
good judgment, knoweth these and all such signs to be- 
token a fertile and plentiful soil : even so great wits and 
haughty spirits do produce and put forth at the first 
many strange, absurd, and lewd pranks ; which we, 
not able to endure, think that the roughness and offen- 
sive pricks thereof ought immediately to be cropped off 
and cut away ; but he who can judge better, attendeth 
and expecteth with patience the age and season, against 
which time the strong nature in such is to bring forth 
and yield her proper and peculiar fruit.^ 

I shall attempt presently, by a few quotations from 
the moral treatises of Plutarch and a brief analysis of 
one or two, to put you in a right position for judging 
what in this line of things he accomplished ; but, 
shut up though I am within narrow limits of time, 
I must preface this attempt with a few words on 
his philosophy — on his whole scheme, that is, of human 
life ; its duties and obligations, its ends and aims ; 
upon which, after all, his treatment of ethical subjects 
must mainly depend. I have mentioned already 
that, apparently by no fault of his own, he stood 
removed from all the immediate influences of the Chris- 
tian Church. This being so, it becomes the more 
important to inquire to which of the Schools, that in 

* De Ser, Num. Vin. 6. 



90 PlutarcJis Morals. 

his day disputed the allegiance of the more thoughtful 
heathen, he addicted himself; by what master he 
swore j or, declining to yield himself absolutely to 
any one, which were those whom he recognized as in 
possession of the largest fragments of the truth. 

At the same time I shall offer a very brief answer to 
these inquiries. Plutarch was a Platonist with an 
Oriental tinge, and thus a forerunner of the New 
Platonists, who ever regarded him with the highest 
honour. Their proper founder indeed he more than 
any other deserves to be called, though clear of 
many of the unhealthy excesses into which, at a 
later date, many of them ran.^ But this said, I shall 
make no attempt to set forth to you at large his philo- 
sophy with its relations to that which preceded and 
that which followed it. This, which has often been 
done, and well done,^ would ill suit with the popular 
character of these lectures ; nor, to say the truth, would 
the task be an easy one. As a thinker, there was 
not anything properly creative about him ; indeed, not 
much constructive, * His teaching had for the most 
part a direct moral object, with little tendency to 
speculative refinements. He cared not for the name 



* ^eCTrecrioy, OeK^raros, are epithets which Eunapius in his 
Lives of the later Sophists gives him ; styhng him, in the af- 
fected language of the time, (l>L\o(To(pLas airdaris 'Acppodirr} Kal 
Xvpa. 

2 Best by Zeller, in his Philosophic der- Griechen, 3rd part, 
pp. 141 -182, and not ill by Schreiter, De Doctrind Plutaj'chi et 
Theologicd et Morali, Lipsias, 1836. 



The Schools of Philosophy. 9 1 

of any sect or leader, but pleaded the cause of moral 
beaut>' in the interests of truth only.' ^ 

It was the easier to hold such an independent 
position as this, from the fact that the rigid lines of 
demarcation which had once separated the different 
systems were at the time when he \vrote in great 
measure effaced ; or, where not effaced, their frontier 
lines w^ere no longer guarded with the same jealous 
care as of old. The Schools had borrowed so much 
from one another, had made so many reciprocal 
concessions, the later teachers had severally explained 
away so much which was most startling, but which also 
was most characteristic, in the teaching of the first 
founders, that it seemed idle to stand absolutely aloof 
on the score of what still remained. There were still, 
it is true, Schools militant of philosophy, but not mili- 
tant as they once had been. AVTien doctrines do not 
affirm themselves strongly, when they cease to be 
intolerant and exclusive, when they transact on im- 
portant points with one another, they may disarm much 
opposition hereby; but none must be surprised to 
find that they have done this at a very serious cost. 
It has not been all gain; the same concessions 



* Merivale, History of the Romans^ vol. vii. p. 456. When 
Scaliger writes of him, * Aulicis tantum scripsit, nondoctis,' this 
may not have been precisely intended for a compliment, yet 
such it was ; and that Scaliger did not mean to imply in the 
words any disparagement of his learning, we may learn from the 
title, ' totius sapientiae ocellus,' which presently after he gives 
him. 



92 PlutarcJis Morals. 

which may have partially disarmed enemies have gone 
far to slacken the zeal of friends. Only that which 
has absolute faith in itself, which dares to say, ^ I am, 
and there is none else beside me,' can awaken the 
passion of an unquestioning devotion in others. No 
one of the rival Schools had any longer such a faith 
as this in its own teaching, felt itself to be so in pos- 
session of the whole body of the truth as would justify 
it in claiming men's allegiance as exclusively due to 
it, or, if it ♦had done this, was in any position to 
make this pretension good. 

The exaggerations of the Stoics, the big statements 
of theirs which are no sooner closely handled than 
they shrink into a very small compass indeed, and 
can only be maintained at all by shifting words to 
quite other than their natural and ordinary meaning, are 
fair objects of ridicule ; while other parts of their 
system, breathing as they, do the spirit of intolerable 
pride, challenge a more earnest confutation. Yet, for 
all this, the Stoic Porch was, in some sort, the noblest 
School of philosophy in the ancient world, and had 
never shown itself so nobly as in those evil times 
which, when Plutarch wrote, were just overlived. It 
had then been seen what this philosophy — the only 
philosophy which Rome ever made truly her own — 
could arm men to do, and, still more, to suffer. When 
all was base and servile elsewhere, it was the last 
refuge and citadel of freedom ; and being felt to be 



Phitarch and the Epicureans. 93 

such, had not failed to earn the instinctive hatred of 
the tyrant and the slave. I confess, therefore, that I 
would willingly have seen in Plutarch some recognition 
of this its nobler aspect. As it is, he has only an eye 
for its contradictions and absurdities, such as Horace 
had laughed at already : ^ as when they taught that all 
sins were of an equal malignity ; that there were no 
such things as a progressive advance from vice to 
virtue ; that to be shut up in the brazen bull of Perillus, 
and to be roasting there, would not affect the happiness 
of a true sage. In some respects, too, his polemics 
against these were a fighting against shadows. It is the 
early extravagances of Zeno and Chrysippus which he 
sets himself to refiite, not the Stoicism of his own day, 
of Epictetus and Seneca ; which last in so many points 
had reconciled itself with common sense, and "with- 
drawn, in fact, if not always in word, though some- 
times also in this,^ from various advanced positions 
which experience had shown to be untenable. 

But with the Stoics, despite of all points of differ- 
ence, Plutarch has very much in common, and this in 
matters of the highest concern. Not so, however, 
with the Epicureans. Between him and the haunters 
of the Garden there lay a chasm not to be bridged 
over; and we recognize in his whole controversy 



» Sat, I. 3. 73-H2. 

2 Thus see Seneca, Ep, 123, in fine 



94 PlutarcJis Morals, 

with these a vein of earnest indignation, as he contem- 
plates the mean ignoble thing to which they would 
fain reduce the life of man, shutting it up within the 
brief limits of this mortal existence; emptying it of 
every loftier aim and hope, and presenting to it 
pleasure, or, more properly, escape from pain, as the 
object to the attainment of which all efforts should be 
directed. From that pessimism, which saw nothing 
higher for man than this, Plutarch was as far as 
possible removed. This world for him was some- 
thing better than a casino with its poor and paltry 
delights. It was a house inhabited in common by 
gods and men, an august temple into which man 
was introduced at his birth, and in which he was 
initiated into mysteries of a high and solemn gladness. ^ 
Gods, such as the Epicureans taught, dwelling apart, 
whom it was equally impossible to please or to 
provoke, who answered no prayer, who punished no 
sin, were no gods to him. He could look with no- 
thing but disdain at the bribe with which the teachers 
of this School sought to bribe men into this practical 
atheism, promising them deliverance from those 
fears of the heavenly powers which had tormented 
them so long. As he often reminds his hearers, they 
could only be thus rid of their fears by at the same 



* D'e Tranq. Aft. 20: tepov ayidorarov 6 koc/jlos ia-ri Kal 
6€OTrp€Tr4(TTaTOV, €ts Bc rovrov 6 avdpusiros elffdyerat dia ttjs 
yeveccccs, — rhv 5e ^iov fiv-qcnp opra Koi reXerT/v r^KeiordTTjP €v6v- 
fxias Set /jLcarhy dvai koI jtjOovs. 



Plutarch and the Eptacrea7ts. 95 

time renouncing their hopes ; and the price was too 
high a one to pay. 

Two or three citations will enable us to understand 
the tone of his controversy with them ; as this, on the 
universal sense and consent of mankind that there are 
powers above, ordering the destinies of men ; even as 
these powers, and men's faith in the existence of these 
powers, constitute the one band and bond which knits 
human societies together, these without such religion 
never having been, and not being so much as con- 
ceivable : 

If you travel through the world, well, you may find cities 
without walls, without literature, without kings, money- 
less, and such as desire no coin ; which know not what 
theatres or public halls of bodily exercise mean ; but 
never was there, nor ever shall there be, any one city 
seen, without temple, church or chapel ; without some god 
or other ; which useth no prayers nor oaths, no prophecies 
and divinations, no sacrifices, either to obtain good 
blessings or to avert heavy curses and calamities. Nay, 
methinks, a man should sooner find a city built in the air, 
without any plot of ground whereon it is seated, than that 
any commonwealth altogether void of religion and the 
opinion of the gods should either be first established, 
or afterwards preserved and maintained in that estate. 
This is that containeth and holdeth together all human 
society ; this is the foundation, prop, and stay of all.^ 

Plutarch had no toleration for that cowardly creep- 
ing into comers, that ignoble \\^thdrawal from all the 



> Adv, Colot. 31. 



96 PltctarcJis Morals. 

tasks and duties of life which the followers of Epicurus 
vaunted as the highest wisdom of all. That *Live 
hidden ' of Epicurus, or of one of his scholars, moved 
his special indignation — so much so, that he has dedi- 
cated a short essay ^ to the refutation of this charac- 
teristic maxim of theirs. For first, if the author of 
this maxim truly wanted to ' live hidden,' why did he 
not hold his tongue, instead of putting forth to the 
world a saying which, by the contradiction it would on 
one side inevitably arouse, and the applause with which 
it would be hailed on another, was sure to draw the 
eyes of many to its author, and to prevent him from 
living his own life according to his own rule ? But the 
precept demanded and received from him a more 
serious refutation than this, directly opposed as it was 
to all his profoundest moral convictions. He can speak 
in language not very remote from that of St. Paul, and 
under imagery which very closely borders on that of 
St. Paul, of life as a contest,^ of man as the champion 
or athlete who, having contended, shall receive ac- 
cording to his deserts ; ^ and when he styles those 
who have done well by the honourable title of bearers 
away of victory,^ we are further reminded of the 



* An rede dictum est, Latenter esse vivendum, 

2 01 TTcpl rhv fiiov ayuves {De Gen, Soc. 23). 

3 a7cyv^feTa£ 7ap, &(TiT€p olOXtjt^s, Kara rhp ' )8(ov drav 5e 
^laycovia-'nTai, rSre Tvyx^t'^i- 'rccv irparjKdvruv (jDe Ser. JVum. 

Vind. 18). 

* yiK7}<p6poi {JDe Fac» in Lun. 28). 



On Public Life 97 



language of another Apostle, for whom the life of a 
Christian is an overcoming of the world, and he who 
remains faithful to the end a conqueror or overcomer.^ 
On the other hand the meanness of the life shut up in 
itself, his life who has wilfully cut himself off from all 
opportunities of serving his fellow-men, and not the 
meanness only, but the practical defeat and missing 
which it involves of that very pleasure for the sake 
of which it had been chosen, has impressed him pro- 
foundly, and he often seeks to impress the same upon 
others ; as in these noble words : 

Surely impossible it is that they should ever have their 
part in any great, royal, and magnificent joy, who have 
made choice of a close and private life within doors, never 
meddling with the public affairs of common weale, a life 
sequestered from all offices of humanity, far removed from 
any instinct of honour or desire to gratify others ; for the 
soul, I may tell you, is no base and small thing, extending 
her desires only to that which is good to be eaten, as do 
those cuttlefishes, which stretch their claws as far as to 
their meat, and no farther ; for such appetites as these 
are most quickly cut off with satiety and filled in a 
moment ; but when the virtues and desires of the mind 
tending to virtue and honesty, to honour also and con- 
tentment of conscience, are once grown to their vigour 
and perfection, they have not for their limit only the 
length and term of man's life, but surely the desire of 
honour and the affection to profit the society of men, 
comprehending all eternity, striveth still to go forward to 



J I John V. 4 ; Rev. 2-7, 11, 17, 26, &c. 
H 



98 Plutarclis Morals 

such actions and beneficial deeds as yield infinite pleasure 
that cannot be expressed.* 

Plutarch could the less endure this voluntary abdi- 
cation on men's part of all active share in the world's 
business, from the strong conviction which he enter- 
tained — a conviction, indeed, which seemed inborn to 
every Greek — of the necessity of public life for the 
harmonious and full development of the whole circle 
of the mental and moral faculties ; and thus, that 
whatever might be the education of the child, this 
exercise of public functions was the true education of 
the man. Out of a sense of this, as is sufficiently 
known, he who was not clothed, or never had been 
clothed, with a public office was an t^iwrr/cor an ^ idiot;' 
the word already in the Greek having obtained some 
little share of that unfavourable meaning which it has 
since and in other languages more fully made its own. 

For all this, he could -not shut his eyes to the fact 
that in the Caesarian world, as in his time it existed, 
there was no room for this public life, save in its 
humblest proportions ; that a small municipal activity 
was all which was then possible. There is something 
sad, with a touch of the ridiculous, in the elaborate 
outline which, at the desire of a pupil inspired with 
an honourable ambition to serve his native city, he 
draws of what the aims and duties of a statesman should 



* Nee Suav. Vivi Posse, 17; coiov^zxq Adv.Colot. ^t^' 



On Ptcblic Life 99 



be, by what studies and discipline he should prepare 
himself for the high functions which he hopes to ex- 
ercise one day.^ Not that with all this he really 
indulges in any illusions. He is too sensible to 
believe, or to endeavour to make others believe, that 
public life, in any such sense as Pericles or Demo- 
sthenes understood or practised it, was any longer 
possible. Thus he does not bring his advice to his 
young friend to a close without having warned him 
more than once of the very narrow limits within which, 
at the very best, his liberty of action will be restricted, 
the speedy and inevitable check, the defeat, in any 
case ridiculous, and not impossibly dangerous, which 
the attempt at a bolder initiative would involve. ' You 
will have/ he says, ' no wars to wage, no tyrants to put 
down, no alliances to conclude. The utmost which 
you can hope for is to suppress some petty abuse, to 
make war on some evil custom, to revive some 
charitable institution which has fallen into decay, to 
repair an aqueduct or rebuild a temple, to adjust some 
local tax, to preside at a sacrifice, or to remove a 
misunderstanding with some neighbouring city.' ^ But 
these and such like duties, small as they were, he yet 
counselled Mnesimachus should be done by a good 
citizen with his might ; and that local independence 
which still survived, small as it was, cherished and 
made much of, and not further diminished by any act 



* Prcec, Ger. Reip,^ passim. ' Prccc, Fol. lo. 

H2 



lOO Pluta7xJis Morals 

of his. He is no friend to centralisation, as these 
words which follow abundantly bear witness : 

Moreover, a governor, in yielding his country unto the 
obedience of mighty sovereigns abroad, ought to take 
good heed that he bring it not into servile subjection ; 
for some there be who, reporting all things both little and 
great to these potentates, deprive their country of all policy 
and form of government, making it so fearful, timorous, 
and fit for no authority or command at all ; and like as 
they, who use themselves to live so physically that they 
can neither dine nor sup nor yet bathe without their phy- 
sician, have not so much benefit of health as nature 
itself doth afford them — even so those states and cities 
which, for all grace and favour, yea, and for the smallest 
administration of affairs, must needs adjoin the consent, 
judgment, and good-liking of those signiors of theirs, they 
even compel the said good lords to be more absolute 
over them than they would themselves. 

And he then traces this wilful renouncing of the 
petty fragments of self-government which remained to 
its true cause, namely, the ' unpatriotic conduct of 
citizens who, whenever worsted in any little dispute 
at home, appeal to the central authority ; whereas the 
true patriot * would choose rather for his own part to 
be vanquished and overthrown by fellow-citizens than 
to vanquish and win the victory by foreign power.' * 

But I have many things still to say — more than in 
this lecture could be included. 



* Frcec, Ger, Reip, 19. 



On Chattering loi 



LECTURE IV. 

P L U T A R C H'S morals. 

(Cofitinued,) 

We have not yet undertaken the analysis of any one 
of Plutarch's moral treatises, and I must despair of 
finding time for such an analysis as should be ex- 
haustive even of the very briefest among these. It 
will, I believe, be a better economy of our time, if 
I pass under review a very few of the most noteworthy 
of these treatises, and briefly call your attention to 
some salient points which they offer. Let us then first 
deal with two which the moralist himself links closely 
together, on the ground that the faults which they 
severally note have intimate connection, though one 
which might be easily missed, with one another. The 
first of these, 0?i Chattering^ or On Intemperate Speech^ 
may be regarded as a long, and yet not a very long, 
commentary on the words of the Psalmist, ' A man 
fiill of words shall not prosper on the earth.' Very 
amusing is the indignation with which he denounces 
here the man who has not a door, and one which, 
when need is, he can keep shut, to his mouth, — a man 



102 PhUarcJis Morals 

i\6vp(.(TT('iJLuv, as elsewhere he calls him. Some faults, 
he observes, are ridiculous, some odious, some danger- 
ous ; but this is all three in one : which then he 
proceeds by various examples — for such are never 
wanting to him — to prove. ' We think ill of traitors, 
who for a great reward, or who, it may be, under 
strong torments, reveal secrets which havel)een con- 
fided to them ; but this chatterer is one who reveals 
them under no temptation, no compulsion at all.' And 
then, urging how this is a vice which infects the whole 
life of a man, he proceeds : ' The drunkard babbles 
at his wine ; but the prattler doth it always and in 
every place, in the market, in the theatre, walking, 
sitting, by day, by night. Does he wait on the sick ? 
He is worse than the disease. Sailing with you, he 
is more unwelcome than the sea-sickness; praising 
you, he is more distasteful than another who should 
blame. And, worst of all, his malady is incurable, or 
well-nigh incurable. He might be healed by whole- 
some words, but all tongue, no ear as he is, he never 
listens ; in his self- chosen deafness he hears nothing.' 
With a true insight into the human heart Plutarch 
closely connects this fault with another. Cutiosity 
Holland calls it — a better rendering perhaps of the 
original word than Meddlesomeness^ which one might 
at first be tempted to prefer, seeing that in the later 
uses of the Greek word for which we are seeking an 
equivalent, the ^ much-doing ' has fallen into the back- 
ground, and the ^ much-noting' or * spying' has becomq 



On Ctcriosity 103 



the prominent notion of the word.^ The two, indeed, 
are linked closely together. He who would chatter 
much can only find the materials for his endless 
babble by much prying into the aifairs of other 
people. How much of this, Plutarch exclaims, is 
there ever)rwhere ! Of how many things we are 
content to remain ignorant, taking no means to know 
them; meanwhile, we can tell of our neighbour's 
grandfather that he was no better than a Syrian slave ; 
of such a one that he owes three talents \ that, more- 
over, the interest is far in arrear. And here he brings 
out with a very earnest emphasis indeed, making this 
the chief subject of the treatise, the evil root out of 
which this curiosity springs ; the evil moral con- 
ditions to which it ministers ; how this ' polypragmon ' 
— for Holland has attempted to naturalize the word — 
with all his eagerness to know, cares only to know 
things which lower the character, abate the felicity, 
or in some way tend to the depreciation and dis- 
paragement of others. Recount to him the prospe- 
rities of his fellow-men, report of fair and fortunate 
events, things comely and of good report, he can 
hardly find patience to hear you out ; but tell of 
discord which has sprung up between brethren, of a 
^vife that has proved unfaithful to her husband, of a 



^ The TroXimpayijLoffvirri has become also an aWoTpLOTrpayfjLoavjn}. 
On the difficulty of rendering -KoXvirpa'y^jLoavuT] in Latin, and 
wath reference to this very treatise, there is an interesting 
chapter in Aulus Gellius, ii. 1 6. 



I04 PhitarcJis Morals 

maiden who has been found to be no maiden, he is all 
ear. Being thus minded, his haunt and home is 
naturally the city, and not the country, which ' for the 
most part bringeth forth no great and tragical events.' 
If for once or twice he has made an expedition 
there, and been absent for three or four hours, he is 
full of eagerness to know what has befallen in his 
absence, cross-examines the first acquaintance whom 
he meets on his return, can hardly be persuaded that 
there is nothing new, that in all this time no accident 
has happened, no scandal come to light. 

As a physician of the soul — and it is his ambition to 
be nothing less than this — Plutarch does not conclude 
without some counsels as to the means by which 
this curiosity may be checked, and in the end over- 
come. And, first, let it never be forgotten how full of 
danger it is for those who give allowance to it. He 
who has ferreted out the secrets of other men may be 
feared, but he will be also hated ; and then he recounts 
the excellent story of Philippides the comic poet ; of 
whom king Lysimachus, being in an effusive and 
generous mood, once demanded, * What of mine shall 
I impart to you ? ' and to whom the wary poet made 
answer, ^Anything, O king, but your secrets.' But 
more than this, let this curiosity be seen for what it 
truly is ; not a harmless weakness at the worst, but a 
disease of the mind, not clear from envy and mali- 
ciousness, a vice, seeing that it mainly occupies itself 
with the faults, imperfections, and infelicities of others. 



Restraints of Curiosity 105 

If then you wish to overcome it, exercise yourself in 
all which is most opposite to it. Be willingly ignorant 
of things which in themselves it would be no harm to 
learn. You are passing through a street of tombs ; 
be content to leave the epitaphs, and the remarks on 
these by previous passers-by, unread. There are 
evidently high words passing between two of your 
acquaintance in the market-place; resist the temp- 
tation to draw near in the hope of gathering what the 
quarrel is about. Make a covenant with your eyes 
and with your ears, against seeing or hearing vanity ; 
for, as he goes on to say, and a Christian moralist 
could not have said it better — 

in mine opinion it is not meet that our sense should 
gad and wander abroad like a wild and untaught girl ; 
but when Reason hath sent it forth to some business, 
after it hath done the errand about which it was set, to 
return speedily again iinto her mistress the soul, and 
make report how she hath sped and what she hath done ; 
and then afterwards to stay at home discreetly, like a 
modest waiting-maiden, giving attendance upon Reason, 
and ready always at her command. 

If letters are brought you, be not as some, who run 
eagerly to meet the messenger, who, in their im- 
patience, tear with their teeth the threads which tie 
them ; and then he concludes — 

I remember upon a time, when I declaimed at Rome, 
that orator Rusticus, whom afterwards Domitian put to 
death for envy that he bare to his glory, happened to be 
there to hear me. Now, in the midst of my lecture, there 



io6 PhUarcJis Morals 

came a soldier with letters from the Emperor, which he 
delivered to Rusticus ; whereupon there was great silence 
in the school, and I myself made some pause whilst he 
might read the letter ; but he would not read it then, nor 
so much as break it open, before I had made an end of 
my discourse and dismissed the auditory ; for which all 
the company there present highly praised and admired 
the gravity of the man.^ 

It mil be perceived from these specimens which I 
have adduced that his suggestions in the way of cure 
have the merit of being practical and practicable ; and 
this merit, I may say, they always have. They are 
practical, for they bear directly on the matter in hand, 
and must have commended themselves to those to 
whom they were addressed, as well adapted to bring 
about the results which they desired. They are practi- 
cable, for it cannot be affirmed that they make too 
large demands, that they are not fairly within the 
reach of any who are seeking in earnest 'to shun the 
evil, or to make the good proposed their o\sti. 

Further too, it is indeed evident from admonish- 
ments such as these, that Plutarch ascribed much value 
to the exercising of ourselves in the resisting of small 
temptations, if we ^vish to prove able to stand when 
greater ones arrive ; by slight self-denials voluntarily 



* Montaigne doubts whether this was so well done as Plutarch 
would have it : * for receiving unexpected letters, and especially 
from an Emperor, it might very well have fortuned that his 
deferring to read them might have caused some notable incon- 
venience. ' 



On Naughty Bashftibiess 107 

imposed, disciplining ourselves for the same when 
they should be required of us on a larger scale. The 
same often reappears in other of his ^Titings, as in his 
admirable litde treatise Against Navghty Bashfulness 
(so Holland calls it) or False Shame — such he means 
as, for example, leads us to shrink from sa}iDgNo, when 
truth and honour and religion demand this refusal from 
us. In this little essay he urges excellentiy well the 
importance of truthfulness in speech and act, in matters 
which make no difficult demand upon us, so to prepare 
and arm ourselves for harder exercises of the same : 

Say that, when you are at a feast of your friends, the 
harper or minstrel do either play or sing out of tune, and 
yet, nevertheless, the \-ulgar sort do applaud, clap their 
hands, and highly commend him for his deed : in my 
advice, it would be no great pain or difficulty for thee to 
give him the hearing with patience and silence, without 
praising him after a serv^Ue and flattering manner. For 
if in such things as these you be not master of yourself, 
how will you be able to hold, when some dear friend of 
yours shall read unto you some foolish rh^me that himself 
have composed, if he shall show unto you some oration of 
his own foolish and ridiculous penning ? You will fall 
a-praising of him, wiU you ? you will keep a-clapping of 
your hands, with other flattering jacks ? And if you do 
so, how can you reprove him when he shall commit some 
gross fault in greater matters ? how shall you be able to 
admonish him, if he chance to forget himself in the 
administration of some magistracy, or in his carriage in 
wedlock, or in politic government ? ^ 



\ Di Fit. Pudore^ 6. 



io8 Plutarc/is Morals 

I am unwilling to interrupt my lecture by seeking 
to trace at any length the uses to which this and 
other ethical writings of Plutarch have been turned 
by those who have come after him. Only I will 
briefly observe that they have proved, as may easily 
be supposed, a rich store-house, from which Christian 
writers in all ages have largely and freely drawn, not 
always remembering to acknowledge the source from 
which their wealth has been derived. Thus Basil the 
Great has a homily against those who borrow money 
at usurious interest, not needing it except for purposes 
of ostentation, luxury and excess.^ In this homily 
the eloquent Greek father treads closely on the foot- 
steps of our moralist, who has written an earnest little 
treatise on the same subject ; though, indeed, he 
brings forward enough of his own, both in the matter 
and form of his discourse, to vindicate this from the 
charge of servile imitation, which has lately been 
brought against it.^ Another homily or treatise of the 
great Cappadocian bishop, addressed to young men, 
and having for its argument, the gain which may be 
gotten from the study of heathen authors,^ has 
derived many hints from a treatise of Plutarch which 
deals with a very similar subject, and has for its 
theme, how a young man may draw profit and not 



* 0pp., Paris, 1839; torn. i. parti, p. 151. 
^ Fialon, Etude Litter aire sur S. Basile, p. 95. 
^ 0pp., Paris, 1839, torn. ii. part i. p. 243. 



Use of Phitarch by Divines 109 

larm from the -writings of the poets. ^ And in 
.11 ages the moral writings of Plutarch have been 
. quarry in which moralists and divines have freely 
wrought ; but one which, for all this, is far from 
;rrought out * I can hardly,' writes Montaigne, ^ do 
rithout Plutarch ; he is so universal and so full, that 
ipon all occasions, and what extravagant subject 
oever you take in hand, he will still intrude himself 
Qto your business, and holds out to you a liberal and 
lot to be exhausted hand of riches and embellish- 
oents.' ^ The index to the works of Jeremy Taylor 
Eden's edition) gives no less than 256 allusions or 
iirect references made by him to the writings of 
^lutarch, many others having no doubt escaped the 
lotice of the editor ; while in our own day the Bishop 
>f Orleans, in his admirable Letters on the Education 
f Girls, has more than once respectfully referred to 
he writings of Plutarch as containing hints on this 
ubject which are valuable for all times. But this of 
he uses to which Plutarch's moral writings have been 
)ut, it would be impossible for me to follow further, 
.nd I must return. 

His essay which has for its theme, How a Man 



* This treatise of St. Basil has from the earliest days of the 
evival of learning been a notable favourite with scholars, was so 
ibove all in those earliest days themselves, having been reprinted 
md re-edited again and again (see Pauly, Encyklopddie^ s. v. 
Basilius). 

' Vol. iii. p. 107, Cotton's translation. 



no PlutarcJis Morals 

may distmguish a Flatta-er from a Friend^ deals with 
a subject which was a very favourite one, which had 
almost grown into a commonplace, among the ethical 
writers of antiquity ; for whom friendship was more, 
and love was less, than they severally are for us in 
the modern Christian world. This essay, one of the 
most elaborate and complete which Plutarch has be- 
queathed to us, affords very curious evidence of the 
high perfection which the art of flattery or assentation 
had at his time reached ; the infinite variety of 
unlooked-for shapes which the flatterer, or spurious 
imitator of the friend, knew how to assume ; the un- 
expected quarters from which to make his approaches, 
so as often to deceive those who counted themselves 
the most completely armed against him.^ It was an 
art in which, as Juvenal assures us, the Greek 
reigned supreme (' adulandi gens prudentissima ') ; his 
cleverness, his versatility, the total absence in too 
many cases of all self-respect, giving him advantages 
which made it hopeless for the duller Roman, who 
still retained some sparks of this, with any prospect of 
success to contend against him. Leaving this treatise, . 
as I am compelled to^do, almost untouched, I yet can- 
not leave it without citing the subtle observation with 
which, at its opening, he accounts for the success of 
the flatterer, and warns of the danger in which men 



^ See on this matter some admirable remarks in Martha, 
Les Moralistes sous VEi7ipire Romai7i^ pp. 308-3 1 1 . 



Flatterers and Friends 1 1 1 

lie of falling a prey to him ; namely, that, blinded as 
they are as to their true character by self-love, every 
man is his own first and chiefest flatterer, prepared 
therefore to welcome the flatterer from the outside, 
who only comes confirming the verdict of the flatterer 
within.^ Again, he is wonderfully happy in laying 
bare the various arts and devices of the flatterer ; as, 
for instance, how, knowing that freedom of speech is 
part of a true friendship, he does not shrink from 
something which aflects to be this, and bears some 
external resemblance to this ; though, indeed, it is 
only itself a subtler flattery all the while. But the 
whole essay is one of the finest and most complete 
which Plutarch has bequeathed us.^ 

A lively French author, who has recently written a 
volume of some merit Oil the Morality of Plutarch^ 
more than once implies that his ethical writings 
are mainly occupied in inculcating the minor morals 
and smaller virtues, while the vices which he de- 
nounces scarcely go beyond the foibles of the petite 
ville^ such as he may have had before his own eyes in 



* e/ca(rTos aurbs avroC K6\a^ &v irpcoros Koi iiiyKTTOs^ oh xaA>€7rcSs 
'n-poaierai 7hv e^ouOev. 

^ There is a good translation of it with the title, C/pon the Dis- 
tinctioji between a Fi'ie^id and Flatterer^ London, 1793, by 
Thomas Northmore. 

* De la ^Moi'alitS de ^ Plutarque^ Paris, 1866, by Octave 
Greard. 



112 Phita^xJis Morals 

his own little Chaeronea.^ The charge is not a just 
one. It might perhaps have some show of justice in 
it, though, to my mind, not the reality, if these writings 
dealt only with such matters as we have just been 
treating. But they attempt, and often accomplish, 
much more than this. They may not offer always 
satisfactory solutions of the great problems of 
humanity ; for, indeed, how should they, when re- 
vealed religion itself on so many of these bids us to 
wait and to be content with the assurance that we shall 
know hereafter ? but he does not shrink from looking 
these problems in the face ; and neither the heights 
which there is need to scale, nor the depths which must 
be fethomed, remain altogether un attempted by him. 
His little treatise On Superstition, or The Wrong 
Fear of the Gods, is a favourite one with those who 
care about these writings of his at all ; and justly : ^ 
'liber vere Plutarcheus,' as Wyttenbach calls it, 



* ' C'est cette emotion relative et cette incontestable justesse de 
bon sens ingenieux qui donnent a tons les petits traites de 
morale sociale de Plutarque une si aimable autorite. Observa- 
teur exact, judicieux, penetrant, des moeurs et des passions de 
la petite ville, le merite du sage de Cheronee est de bien decrire 
ce qu'il observe et d'opposer aux travers et aux vices, dont il 
connait le principe, des remedes dont il sait les eifets. Que, 
dans les sujets d'ecole, la tradition I'entraine a la suite de ses 
devanciers, il faut bien le reconnaitre ; mais generalement il 
echappe a la banalite du lieu conmiun, soit par le caractere 
personnel de ces obsei-vations, soit par Tapplication qu'il en fait 
a la societe qui I'entoure.' 

2 Compare Neander, Kircheiigeschichte^ vol. i. p. 25. 



On Stiperstition 1 1 3 

though ending so abruptly as to leave upon one the 
impression that it is rather the fragment of a book 
than one complete. This ' superstition ' he treats in 
the fashion of the Peripatetics, as one of two extremes, 
atheism being the other \ men not seldom falling into 
the latter of these while they seek to flee from the 
former.^ Between these extremes as the golden 
mean, alike removed from both, piety or the right 
reverence of the gods resides. 

It was a subject which called for very careful 
handling, lest in getting rid of what was harmful and 
mischievous, there might also be put away that which 
it would be a most serious calamity to lose. No man 
was more conscious of the need of caution here, of the 
danger which waited on any rude and rough dealing 
with faults which yet had something akin to that 
which was not faulty, but good and worthy to be re- 
tained. He more than once compares it to the de- 
molishing of houses which join on to temples — a 
process demanding the exercise of a most reverent 
heed, lest in removing what is man's, what is ruinous 
and ought to disappear, there be drawn after this, and 
into the same ruin, what is God's, and ought to stand. 
Another image he has elsewhere on the same subject 
and to the same effect : 

The skilful husbandman, when he would rid the ground 
of some wild bushes, layeth at them mainly with his 
grubbing hook or mattock, until he have fetched them 



De Isid. et Osir. 67. 
I 



114 PhttarcKs Morals 

up by the root ; but when he comes to prune or cut a 
vine, an apple-tree, or an olive, he carrieth his hand 
lightly, for fear of wounding any of the sound wood in 
fetching oif the superfluous and rank branches, and so kill 
the heart thereof.^ 

Whether he escapes altogether the danger which he so 
clearly sees, will best be judged when we have made a 
little closer acquaintance with this most interesting 
essay, to which I return. 

Of the two extremes, superstition and atheism, the 
former, as Plutarch argues, at least on this occasion — for 
elsewhere ^ he has somewhat modified this statement — 
is the worst. The atheist, indeed, does not believe 
that there are gods; while the superstitious is per- 
suaded that there are such, but that they are capri- 
cious, cruel, and revengeful ; which is a far worse 
affront.^ * I had much rather/ he urges, * that men 
should say, There is no such man as Plutarch, than 
that they should say, Plutarch is a man inconstant, 
capricious, easily offended, seeking on the least and 
lightest provocation to do the utmost harm to those 
who have offended him.' '^ 



1 De Vit. Pud, 2. ^ Nee Suav, Viv, Posse, 20, 21. 

3 Seneca {Ep. 123), travelling in the same line of thought, sets 
the two on the same level : * Quid enim interest utrum Deos 
neges an infames ?* 

4 lxLKp6\vTro5, an epithet applied to one v^ho takes offence at 
small things, so far as I know is a word peculiar to the ethical 
terminology of Plutarch, at least the lexicons give no other 
example. I take this occasion to observe that the ethical 



On Stiperstition 115 

Many noble utterances this treatise contains on the 
duty of thinking right things of the heavenly powers, 
and things honourable to them, than which no service 
is more acceptable to them ; ^ and first and chiefly, 
that they are friends to men, saviours (fTLjrTjnec) and 
not destroyers ; whose nearness, therefore, brings with 
it not hurt and harm, but help and salvation. At the 
same time it is impossible to affirm that all the truth is 
with him, and that these poor superstitious, despite of 
all their exaggerations, were not witnessing, however 
blindly, for truths in their kind quite as important as 
those glorious ones which Plutarch was so strong to 
maintain. There was something also to be said for 
them. They, with their consciousness of disturbed 
relations between themselves and the Highest, and 
with their sense that there needed something to be done 
to restore these disturbed relations again — who, when 
a child was snatched away, or some other misfortune 
befel them, traced up this, not to chance, not to the 



terminology of Plutarch is singularly rich. There are not a few 
terms, and some of them very significant ones, which, so far 
as the evidence of the Greek literature, that has come down to 
us reaches, he is the first to employ, or which he alone has 
employed. Of course, in making an assertion such as this, one 
is mainly dependent on the Greek lexicons ; but if these can 
be relied on, the following words are his, and either his only, 
or his the first : evawdWaKios (see Wyttenbach, Am'mad. in 
Plut. vol. i. p. 367), ir€pLavro\oyia, ix^yaXoTrdOeta, TroXvirdd^ia, 
ave^iKaKla, lepo(p6pos, hp6aT0\0Sy (pL\o\vTros ( = <pi\airLos)y nor 
would it be hard to add others to this list. 
* Compare De hid. et Osir. 9. 
I 2 



1 1 6 PlutarcJis Morals 

blind walk of mortal accident, but went back upon 
their past lives, on all of duty which they had omitted, 
of sin which they had committed, who thereupon 
clothed themselves in sackcloth, wallowed in ashes, 
heard angry voices in the thunder, counted all nature 
to be armed for their hurt — were not so wholly 
astray as Plutarch believed them to be. There were 
obscurely working in their minds truths to which he 
failed to do justice. They may often have erred, con- 
demning themselves for what were petty faults or no 
faults at all, while they passed by the more real and 
graver transgressions of their lives. When they 
devised devices of expiation for themselves, of these 
some may have been childish follies, some hideous 
mistakes. But there was a truth behind them all. To 
say to one thus refusing comfort, and exclaiming to 
those who would fain bring it, ^ Let me alone, wicked 
and. profane creature that I am, accursed, hated of all 
the gods, demigods, and saints in heaven,' — to tell such 
a one that the heavenly powers are gentle (ineiXixioi)^ 
well-willers to man, saviours and not destroyers, this 
is well : but it is not the whole message which he 
needs. There is something which Plutarch could not 
tell him, and no fault therefore can be found with the 
omission upon his part ; but yet which needs to be 
told ; of One, that is, who already when Plutarch 
wrote, had borne, and borne away, the sins of the 
world, although the tidings of this finished work had 
not reached his ears nor theirs for whom he wrote. 



I 



Delays of Divine justice 117 

There is another treatise in a still higher strain, 
which I would willingly bring to } our knowledge. In 
my last lecture I mentioned it under this title, On 
the Delays in the Divine Justice. The title by which 
in Latin it is known, De Sera Niiminis Viiidictd^ per- 
haps better explains its character and intention. It 
may be regarded as Plutarch's Theodicee, his answer 
to the question, * Wherefore doth the way of the 
wicked prosper ? Wherefore are all they happy that 
deal very treacherously ? ' It is his ' Fret not thyself be- 
cause of the evil doers, neither be thou envious against 
the workers of iniquity;' his justification of the 
ways of God in a matter which has perplexed so many, 
in so many ages and in so many lands ; which sorely 
perplexed Job, and for which the friends of Job could 
find only unsatisfying solutions, and such as the God 
of truth disallowed (Job 41, 8) ; which perplexed the 
Psalmist, so that he could find no answer at all, until 
he went into the sanctuary of God ; which perplexed 
the heathen no less, all, that is, among them, to whom 
the righteousness of God was dear, all who yearned 
to believe that there was a righteous government 
of the world, and who yet found it hard to reconcile 
this faith with so much which they saw everywhere 
around them of the prosperity of the wicked and the 
sufi"ering of the good. Plutarch perceived clearly that 
for a completely satisfying vindication of the divine 
righteousness, there needed to bring in another and a 
higher world, as the complement of this ; which should 



1 1 8 PliitarcJis Morals 

redress all that had been left unredressed in this 
present ; and the dialogue (for the discussion is thrown 
into this form), closes with a report of the account 
given by a revenaiit of all which he had seen in that 
world of retributions from which he had been per- 
mitted to return. This, of which the hint has been 
plainly taken from the vision of Er the Pamphylian 
in the Republic of Plato, ^ is not altogether unworthy 
to stand beside it. At the same time Plutarch is 
careful not to throw the whole weight of the argument 
for this righteous government of the earth on a world 
out of human sight. Men might find it hard to 
believe in a God of judgment, if He did not, even 
here and now, give signs and tokens of his presence, 
repaying men and nations to their face, and extorting, 
in this present time, even from the most unwilling a 
confession, ' Verily there is a God that judgeth the 
earth.' And such signs and tokens there are ; for if, 
in this present world, judgments seem to tarry, and in 
some sense do tarry long, yet in another sense they 
often do not tarry at all, the punishment being t^vin- 
born with the sin, both springing together from the 
same bitter root : for, as he nobly says, ^ wickedness 
frameth of herself the engines of her own torment, as 
being a wonderful artisan of a miserable life,' — all 
which he speaks on this matter running worthily parallel 
with what Juvenal has so nobly uttered upon the 

same theme.^ 

1 X., 13-16. 2 Sat. xiii. 



Solidarity of Nations 1 1 9 

And, moreover, this tarrying of theirs involves no 
chance of impunity. The fish which has swallowed 
the bait, and with th,e bait the hook, is already taken, 
though it be not yet drawn to land, nay, though it be 
still sporting in the waters, unconscious of its certain 
fate. God can afford to wait. A malefactor under 
sentence in his prison has not escaped his doom, the 
bitterness of death is not passed for him, because he 
may not be executed to-day or to-morrow. The world 
is such a prison-house for wicked men, and one out of 
which there is no chance of their escaping. ^ Now if 
in the meanwhile,' he goes on to say, * they sit at feasts, 
send presents, wear crowns, disport themselves in 
divers manners, what is all this but as the games at 
dice, or other plays, with which condemned male- 
factors pass away the time, and amuse themselves, 
w^hile as yet the deathsman is not actually at the 
door?' 

Then, too, as he proceeds to urge, there are judg- 
ments which, lighting not on one generation, do yet 
light on a succeeding ; for he is very profoundly im- 
pressed with the solidarity of families and of nations \ 
and he thus justifies the dealing with them as with a 
moral unit, of which the component parts cannot isolate 
themselves, nor claim immunity from the common lot : 

There seemeth to be very apparent reason of justice 
that public vengeance from above should fall upon cities 
many a year after ; for that a city is one entire thing, and 
a continued body as it were, like unto a living creature, 
which goeth not beside or out of itself for any mutations 



1 20 PrntarcHs Morals 

of ages, nor in tract and continuance of time changing 
first into one and then into another by succession ; but 
is always uniform and like itself, receiving evermore 
and taking upon it all the thank for well-doing, or the 
blame for misdeeds, of whatsoever it doth or hath done in 
common, so long as the society that linketh and holdeth 
it together maintaineth her unity ; for to make many, 
yea, and innumerable cities of one, by dividing it accord- 
ing to space of time, were as much as to go about to 
make of one man many, because he is now become old, 
who before was a youth, and in times past also a very 
stripling or springall.^ 

And he proceeds further to justify this dealing of 
God with men in words which would have gone far 
to satisfy St. Augustine, and to meet the demands of 
his theology ; for indeed they need only to be pushed 
a little further, and they would declare the moral 
solidarity of the whole human race, and the deep 
ground of reality on which this reposes, so that it is 
possible for the head of a race to diffuse a taint through 
the whole of the race of which he is the source and 
spring : 

Now if it be that a city is an united and continued 
thing in itself, we are to think no less of a race and 
progeny, which dependeth upon one and the same stock, 
producing and bringing forth a certain power and com- 
munication of qualities; and the same doth reach and 



* De Ser. Vind. 15: eV ri Trpajfia koI (tvpcx^s tj ttoKls, Sxrirep 
(wov ovK i^Lardfxeuoi/ avrrjs rats Ka& 7]XiKiav {x^ra^oKoLS^ ouS' 
erepou e| erepov rev xp^^VJ^^^I^^'^^^i aA\a av/xiradhs ael Kal o'lKuoy 
avr^, K,r.\. 



Delays of Divine Justice 121 

extend to all those who descend from it ; neither is the 
thing engendered of the same nature that a piece of work 
is, wrought by art, which incontinently is separate from 
the workman, for that it is made by him, and not of him ; 
whereas contrariwise that which is naturally engendered is 
formed of the very substance of that which engendered 
it, in such sort that it doth carry about some part thereof, 
which by good right deserveth either to be punished or to 
be honoured even as in itself. 

This truth, let me note in passing, he contemplates 
here, not on its sadder side only, but in words which 
do not exclude its more blessed aspect as well. 
And this more blessed aspect it has ; for if there be 
who, like the first Adam, diffuses death through the 
whole race and progeny which trace their origin to 
him, so also there may be another Head, who is the 
author, not of death, but of life to all. 

Such are in the main Plutarch's explanations of 
the awful silences of Heaven, the mysterious tarryings 
of the divine judgments, the manifold occasions on 
which they seem to miscarry altogether. No doubt 
they do linger — fxiWei to Oelov — he does not deny it, 
but he counts that he has answer and explanation 
sufficient of these delays.^ 



* It is a fact worthy of commemoration that this noble essay 
was a great favourite with Joseph de Maistre, author of the 
Soirees de St. Petersbourg^ and was by him translated into 
French ; he, during his dreary exile from his native land, 
strengthening himself by it, as he beheld well nigh the whole 
civilized world lying for long years at the feet of one triumphant 
wrong-doer. How much Neander owed at the most critical 



12 2 PhitarcJis Morals 

I may observe here, and as nearly connected with 
that which just has gone before, that there is no 
truth which has more deeply impressed itself on 
Plutarch's mind, none to which he more often recurs 
than this, namely that the springs and fountains of all 
true satisfaction for the soul of man are from wdthin ; 
that this satisfaction is not to be found in our sur- 
roundings, however favourable these may be ; that it is 
we who must first impart to these things which sur- 
round us the grace and charm, which afterwards enables 
them to contribute to our happiness, just as, to use 
his own familiar and felicitous illustration, it is we 
who make our clothes warm, and not our clothes which 
make us warm. 

And not less firm for him stands the counterpart of 
this, namely, that wickedness of itself suffices to make 
men miserable, — he has indeed a litde essay bearing 
this very tide, — that the. true fountains of bitterness 
are those which men open in their o^vn hearts, not 
those which they meet with on their outward path ; 
that ^ while with virtue any sort of life is pleasant and 
void of sorrow, vice causeth those things which other- 
wise seemed great, honourable, and magnificent, to 
be odious, loathsome, and unwelcome to those that 
have them.' Let me quote his own words here : 



moment of his life to Plutarch, in all likelihood to this treatise, 
and how well pleased he was to own the obligation, is recorded 
in an interesting notice of the great historian's early life, in the 
TJuoL Stud, u. Kritiken, 185 1, p. 522. 



On Oracles and Inspiration 123 

It seemeth, and commonly is thought, that they be the 
garments which do heat a man ; and yet of themselves 
they neither do heat nor bring any heat with them ; for 
take any of them apart by itself, you shall find it cold. 
But the truth is this, look what heat a man doth yield 
from himself, the clothes or garments which cover the 
body do keep in the same, and being thus included and 
held in, suffer it not to evaporate and vanish away. The 
same error in the state of life hath deceived many men, 
who imagine that if they may live in stately and gorgeous 
great houses, be attended upon with a number of servants, 
retain a sort of slaves, and can gather together huge sums 
of gold and silver, they shall live in joy and pleasure ; 
whereas in very sooth the sweet and joyful life pro- 
ceedeth not from anything without ; but contrariwise, 
when a man hath those goodly things about him, it is 
himself that addeth a pleasure and grace unto them, even 
from his own nature and civil behaviour, composed by 
moral virtue within him, which is the very fountain and 
lively spring of all good contentment.^ 

The oracles, as voices and utterances of a god 
directly speaking to man, interested Plutarch pro- 
foundly; and he often treats of the subject, and from 
various points of view. It would be impossible for 
me to follow him here. Only I will observe that it is 
not a little curious to find the whole question of inspi- 
ration, of the human and divine elements which meet 
in this, of what are the several limits of each, and what 
the mutual action and re-action of each upon the 



^ De Virt, et Vit. i. 



1 24 Phctarclis Morals 

other, carefully discussed and defined on more than 
one occasion by him. It is not a little interesting to 
find the same difficulties urged, and the same solutions 
of these difficulties proposed, as those with which at 
this day we are familiar. Thus an Epicurean argues 
of the oracles of Delphi that they cannot be utterances 
of a god, on the ground of the faulty structure of many 
of the verses in which they are delivered, being 
such, he urges, as never could have proceeded from 
Apollo, the god of music and of song. To this 
Plutarch, or one who evidently expresses his senti- 
ments, replies very much as at this day it is replied, 
that the enthusiasm, though most truly a divine 
afflatus and influence, yet has human souls for the 
sphere of its operation, and will necessarily take much 
of its outward form and fashion from these ; that the 
agitation of the spirit is divine, but that much after 
this is human, and is the result of the varying condi- 
tions of diflerent souk, or of the same at different 
times. Thus, on these lame Delphian verses he 
says : 

Howsoever these be worse than those of Homer, let us 
not think that it is Apollo who made them ; but when he 
hath given only the beginning of motion, then each 
prophetess is moved according as she is disposed to 
receive his inspiration. For surely that voice is not the 
god's, nor the sound, nor the phrase, nor yet the metre 
and verse ; but a woman's they be all. As for him, he 
representeth unto her fancies only and imaginations, 
kindling a light in the soul to declare things to come ; 



Dttty of Thankfulness 125 

and such an illumination as this is that which they call 
e7ithiisias}nos} 

I have already brought before you passages not a 
few from the writings of Plutarch, in which the natural 
piety of the man finds utterance. Before we bring 
all to an end, I would fain adduce one or two more 
of the same character. Thus, on the duty of thank- 
fulness, and the multitude of reasons which we have 
for this, he has many excellent words — these, for 
instance, on those common every-day mercies of life, 
whose very commonness, which ought to enhance 
our gratitude, often causes that they draw forth from 
us no gratitude at all : 

And yet we must not forget nor omit those blessings 
and comforts of this life which we enjoy in common with 
many more, but to make some reckoning and account of 
them ; and namely, to joy in this, that we live, that we 
have our health, that we behold the light of the sun ; 
that we have neither war abroad nor civil sedition at 
home ; but that the land yieldeth itself to be tilled, and 
the sea navigable to every one that will, without fear of 
danger ; that it is lawful for us to speak and keep silence 
at our pleasure ; that we have liberty to negotiate and to 
deal in affairs, or to rest and be at repose. And verily 
the enjoying of these good things present will breed the 
greater contentment in our spirit, if we would but imagine 
within ourselves that they were absent ; namely, by calling 
to mind what a miss and desire those persons have of 
health who be sick and diseased ; how they wish for peace 



* Cur Pyth. nunc non redd. 7 ; cf. 21. im-cKKavfia irapex^t kqI 
apxhv, he says elsewhere. (De Def, Orac. 48, 51.) 



126 PhUarcJis Morals 

who are afflicted with wars . . . And surely a -thing 
cannot be great and precious when we have lost it, and 
the same of no valour and account all the while we have 
and enjoy it.^ 

What I just now ventured to call the natural piety 
of Plutarch's mind utters itself still more distinctly in 
the words which follow. There were> some to whom 
the service of the heavenly powers might present 
itself as a joyless task, a heavy bondage ; not such 
was his experience of it : 

For surely no exercises recreate us more than those of 
religion and devotion in the temples of the gods ; no 
times and seasons are more joyous than solemn feasts 
in their honour ; for at such times our soul is nothing 
sad, cast down or melancholic, as if she had to deal with 
some terrible tyrants or bloody butchers, where good 
reason were that she should be heavy and dejected. But 
look where she thinketh and is persuaded most that God 
is present, in that place especially she casteth behind her 
all anguishes, agonies, sorrows, fears and anxieties : there, 
I say, she giveth herself to all manner of joy, whereof he 
hath no part at all who denieth the providence of God ; 
for it is not the abundance of wine there drunk, nor the 
store of roast and sodden meat there eaten, which yieldeth 
joy and contentment, but the assured hope and full per- 
suasion that God is there present, propitious, favourable 
and gracious, and that He accepteth in good part the 
honour and service done unto Him. 

I shall bring my pleasant task to a close, with a 



^ De Ti'anq. A7iim. 9. 



Sum Total of Impressio7is 127 

very few remarks which have often suggested them- 
selves to me as I have occupied myself with the 
ethical writings of Plutarch. It may, I think, very 
fairly be a question whether we do not exaggerate the 
moral corruption of the age to which he belongs, as 
compared with that of other ages in the world's his- 
tory. Doubtless there was then, as there is always, a 
world lying in the Wicked One, monstrous outbreaks 
of evil j but it may very well have been that these 
only seemed, and now seem to us, more monstrous 
than any similar outbreaks which had gone before, be- 
cause acted on a wider and more conspicuous stage ; 
because Rome, gathering to herself the riches and 
resources of the whole civilized world, enabled those 
who wielded those resources to indulge in more fran- 
tic excesses of luxury, to sin upon a more Titanic 
scale than had been within the power of any that 
went before. It may very fairly be a question whether 
we do not sometimes accept as the rule, deeds and 
practices which were only the exceptions, and which, 
indeed, attest themselves as such by the indignation 
which, in their owoi day, they aroused, by the 
vehemence with which they were denounced. 

All acknowledge that the age was one in which 
there were at least some efforts made, and those not 
wholly ineffectual, to arrest the progress of the world's 
corruption, the terrible swiftness with which it had 
been travelling to its doom. Certainly the sum-total 
impression which Plutarch's own moral writings leave 



128 PhitarcJis Morals 

upon the mind is not that of a society so poisoned and 
infected through and through with an evil leaven, that 
there was no hope of mingling a nobler leaven in the 
lump. He does not speak as one crying in the 
wilderness, but as confident that he will find many 
hearts, a circle of sympathetic hearers, to answer to 
his appeals. 

It may be urged, indeed, that his native kindliness, 
that benignant interpretation of things which I have 
already noticed as objected to him, his readiness to 
believe the best of every man, reaching, as he himself 
admits, to a credulity on his part,^ hindered him from 
taking the full measure of the sin round him and about 
him j and no doubt it is true that the fierce indigna- 
tion which consumed the heart of Tacitus, which put 
a lash into the hands of Juvenal, was deficient in him. 
Yet surely his was no rose-coloured view of life, who 
could speak of the course and fashion of the world in 
language like the following : 

All human affairs are full throughout of vice ; and man's 
life, even from the very first beginning and entry as it 
were of the prologue, and unto the final conclusion of all 
and epilogue, yea and to the very plaudit e^ being dis- 
ordinate, degenerate, full of perturbation and confusion, 
and having no one part thereof pure and unblameable, is 
the most unpleasant and odious interlude of all others 
that can be exhibited.^ 

Or hear him once more. There are moralists who 



De Coh. Ird, 1 6. ^ De Comin. Notion. 14. 



His Estmiate of Human Natter e 1 29 

can denounce sins^ but have no eye for sin. That he 
had an eye for both, and saw the important distinction 
between them, is sufficiently evident from such an 
utterance as the following : 

And to say truth, herein are we mightily deceived, that 
we think men are become unjust then only, and not 
before, when they do injury ; or dissolute, when they play 
some insolent and loose part ; cowardly-minded, when 
they run out of the field ; as if a man should have the 
conceit, that the sting in a serpent was then bred, and not 
before, when he gave the first prick ; or the poison in 
vipers was engendered then only, when they bit or stung ; 
which surely were great simplicity and mere childish- 
ness : for a wicked person becometh not then such an 
one, even when he appeareth so, and not before ; but he 
hath the rudiments and beginnings of vice and naughti- 
ness imprinted in himself; but he sheweth and useth the 
same, when he hath means, fit occasion, good opportunity, 
and might answerable to his mind.^ 

But still more remarkable are some other words of 
his, words far in advance of all which a Pelagian would 
admit, words, indeed, in w^hich the listening Christian 
ear can detect the voice of one who is not very far 
from the confession, not of sin only as superinduced 
and learned, but of sin original and innate : 

If thou wilt anatomize and open thyself, thou shalt find 
within a store-house and treasure of many evils and 
maladies, and those of divers and sundry sorts, not enter- 
ing and running in from abroad, but having their original 
sources springing out of the ground and home-bred, the 

' De Serd Num. Vind. 20. 
K 



1 36 Plutarch s Morals 

which vice, abundant, rich, and plenteous in passions, 
piitteth forth.^ 

Such statements as these must have their weight ; 
and in forming our estimate from Plutarch's own 
writings of the moral conditions of that world in 
which he lived and wrought, let the needful allowance 
be made for his disposition to see all things and 
persons in the most favourable light ; yet certainly it 
cannot be affirmed of one who could express himself 
in language like this, that as a physician of souls he 
only faintly apprehended the malignity of the hurts 
which he was fain to heal ; that he saw only men's 
faults and foibles, when he should have seen their 
sins and their crimes. The remedies he proposed 
may have been often insufficient, and in some sense 
they must have been insufficient ; the deep hurt of the 
heathen world was not healed. But that just about 
this time voices were lifted up in behalf of righteous- 
ness and truth, and these out of the midst of the 
heathen world itself, such as had not before been 
heard, all capable of judging are agreed. What share 
in so excellent a work the Sage of Chaeronea bore 
it is impossible to detemifne, but some share 



' I have seldom appended the original text, if satisfied that 
the translation, though sometimes a little lax, was substantially 
correct. Here, however, I will add it [Corp. an An. Aff. 
Grav. 2 :) ^v creavrbv euBovavoi^i^s^ ttoikiKov tl koX Tro\v7ra6es KaKcov 
Ta/xtToi/ cvpificreis /cat BrjaavpicTfJia, . . . ovk e^codeu iTrLppedvTcou, 
aXA' warep iyyeiovs Kal avTox^ovas nrjyas exotrwj/, cty aj/i-qaiv i) 
KOMiOj TToXvx^TOS KOLL da\f/i\^s ov(Ta To7s irdOeaiy. 



Cone hiding Remarks 131 

he assuredly had. And here we part with him, 
glad to think, in the midst of that sad perplexity 
with which oftentimes we contemplate the world 
before Christ, or out of Christ, that it has had such 
men ; glad to believe, and surely this is no amiable 
delusion, that their work and witness, with c.11 it^ 
weaknesses and shortcomings, was not in their own 
time altogether in vain ; and that even in times long 
after the value of it has not wholly past away. 



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Second Edition. 8vo. 7^. \_Conti)iued. 

MACMILLAN & CO., London. 



WORKS BY R. CHENEVIX TRENCH, D.D. 3 

Jicstin Martyr y mid other Poems, 

Fifth Edition. Fcp. 8vo. 6j. 

Gitstavtts Adolpktcs in Germany, and other 
Lectures 07i the Thirty Years' War. 
Second Edition, Enlarged. Fcp. 8vo. 4J-. 

Poems. 

Collected and arranged anew. Fcp. 8vo. ^s. 6d. 

Poems from Eastern Soit7xes, Genoveva, 
and other Poems, 
Second Edition. Fcp. 8vo. 5^-. (id. 



Elegiac Poems. 

Third Edition. Fcp. 8vo. is. 6d. 



C alder on s Lifes a Drea^n : 

The Great Theatre of the World. With an Essay on his 
Life and Genius. Fcp. 8vo. 4^. 6d. 

Remains of the late Mrs. Richard Trench. 

Being Selections from her Journals, Letters, and other 
Papers. New and Cheaper Issue. With Portrait. 8vo. 6^. 

[Cofiiiuiic'd. 

MACiMILLAN & CO., London. 



4 WORKS BY R. CHENEVIX TRENCH, DID. 

Commentary on the Epistles to the Seven 
Churches in Asia, 
Third Edition, Revised. 8vo. Zs. 6d. 

Sacred Latin Poetry. 

Chiefly Lyrical. Selected and Arranged for Use. Second 
Edition, Corrected and Improved. Fcp. Svo. ^s. 

Studies in the Gospels. 

Second Edition. Svo. lOj. 6^. 

The Sermon on the Mount, 

An Exposition drawn from the Writings of St. Augustine, 
with an Essay on his merits as an Interpreter of Holy 
Scripture. Third Edition, Enlarged. Svo. loj-. dd. 

Shipwrecks of Faith : 

Three Sermons preached before the University of Cam- 
bridge in May 1867. Fcp. Svo. 2s. 6d. 

A Household Book of English Poetry. 

Selected and Arranged, with Notes by the Archbishop 
OF Dublin. Second Edition, Revised. Extra fcp. Svo. 
5^. (yd. 



MACMILLAN & CO., London. 



March 1873. 

A Catalogue of Theological Books, 
with a Short Account of their 
Character and Aim, 

Published by 

macmilla:n" az^d go. 

Bedfo7^d Street, Covent Garden, London, 



Abbott (Rev. E. A.)— Works by the Rev. E. A. Abbott, 
M.A., Head Master of the City of London School. 
BIBLE LESSONS. Second Edition. Crown 8vo. 4^.6^. 
** Wise, suggestive, and really profound iftitiation into religious 
thought. " — Guardian. The Bishop of St. Davids, in his speech 
at the Education Conference at Abergwilly, says he thinks ** nobody 
could read them ivithout being the better for them himself and 
being also able to see hazu this difficult duty of imparting a sound 
religious education may be effect ed^ 

THE GOOD VOICES : A Child's Guide to the Bible. 

With upwards of 50 Illustrations. Crown 8vo. cloth gilt. 5j-. 

*'// would not be easy to combine simplicity with fulness and depth of 

meaning more sicccessfully than Mr. Abbott has done. " — Spectator. 

The Times says — ''J/r. Abbott writes with clearness, simplicity, 

and the deepest religious feeling. " 

I 
loooo. 3. 73. 



THEOLOGICAL BOOKS, 



Ainger (Rev. Alfred).— SERMONS PREACHED IN 
THE TEMPLE CHURCH. By the Rev. Alfred Ainger, 
M. A. of Trinity Hall, Cambridge, Reader at the Temple Church. 
Extra fcap. 8vo. 6s. 

This volume contains twenty -four Sei'mons preached at various times 
during the last fezv years in the Temple Church, and are charac- 
teHsed by such qualities as are likely to make them acceptable to 
cultivated and thoughtful readers. The folloiving are a feiu 
of the topics treated of: — ^^ Boldness f^ ''''Mutter, Ancient and 
Modern f' ''The Atonement;'' '' The Resurrection f' '' The Fear 
of Death f *' The Forgiveness of Sins, the Re?nissiojt of a Debt'" 
(2 Sermo7ts); ''Anger, Noble and Ignoble;'' " Cultttre and 
Temptation;" "The Religious Aspect of Wit and Humour;" 
"The Life of the Ascended Christ." "It is," the British Quar- 
terly says, ' ' the fresh unconventional talk of a clear independent 
thinker, addressed to a congregation of thinkers .... Thoughtful 
mett will be greatly charmed by this little volume." 

Alexander.— THE LEADING IDEAS of the GOSPELS. 

Five Sermons preached before the University of Oxford in 1870 — 

.71. By William Alexander, D.D., Brasenose College; Lord 

Bishop of Derry and Raphao ; Select Preacher. Cr, 8vo. 4^-. dd. 

Each of these Sermons is on a characteristic text taken successively 
fro77i each of the four Gospel's, there being two on that from St. 
John ; viz.— St. Matt. i. l ; St. Mark i. I ; Si. Luke i. 3 ; St. John 
i. I, 14. "Dr. Alexander is eminently fitted for the task he has 
undertaken. He has a singular felicity of style, zvhich lights up 
the discourse and clothes it with great beauty ano! impressiveness." 
— Nonconformist. 

Arnold.— A BIBLE READING BOOK FOR SCHOOLS. 
The Great Prophecy of Israel's Restoration (Isaiah, 
Chapters 40 — 66). Arranged and Edited for Young Learners. By 
Matthew Arnold, D.C.L., formerly Professor of Poetry in the 
University of Oxford, and Fellow of Oriel. Third Edition. i8mo. 
cloth. IS. 
Mr. Arnold has undertaken this really importatit task, on account 



THEOLOGICAL BOOKS. 



of his co7iviction *' of the itnynense importance in education of what 
is called letters ; of the side ivhich engages our feelings and imagina- 
tion.^^ In this little voliune he attempts to do for the Bible what has 
been so abundantly done for Greek and Roman, as well as Lnglish 
authors ; viz. — to take ' ' so7ne whole, of admirable literary beauty 
in style and treatment, of manageable length, within defined li??iits ; 
and present this to the learner in an intelligible shape, adding such 
explanations and Jielps as 7?iay enable him to grasp it as a connected 
and complete work.'''' The Times says — ^^ Whatever may be the 
fate of this little book in Government Schools, there can be no doubt 
that it ivill be found excellently calculated to further instruction in 
Biblical litei'citure in any school into which it ??iay be introduced. . . 
We can safely say that whatever school uses this book, it will enable 
its pupnls to under stajid Isaiah, a great advantage cof?ipared with 
other establishments which do not avail themselves ofit.^'' 

Baring-Gould.— LEGENDS OF OLD TESTAMENT 
CHARACTERS, from the Talmud and other sources. By the 
Rev. S. Baring-Gould, M.A., Author of "Curious Myths of 
the Middle Ages," ''The Origin and Development of Religious 
Belief," "In Exitu Israel," etc. In two vols, crown 8vo. i6j-. 
Vol. I. Adam to Abraham. Vol. II. Melchizidek to Zechariah. 
Mr. Baring-Gould's previous contributions to the History of Mytho- 
logy, and the formation of a science of comparative religion are 
admitted to be of the highest i?nportance ; the present work, it is 
believed, will be found of equal value. He has collected from the 
Tahmid and other sotcrces, fewish and Makommedan, a large 
number, of curious and interesting legends concerning the principal 
characters of the Old Testament, compari?zg these frequently with 
similar legends current among many of the peoples, savage and 
civilised, all oz'er the world. ^^ These volumes contain much that 
is sti'ange, and to the ordinary English reader, very 72oz'el." — 
Daily News. 

Barry, Alfred, D.D.— The ATONEMENT of CHRIST. 

Six Lectures delivered in Hereford Cathedral during Holy Week, 
1871. By Alfred Barry, D.D., D.C.L., Canon of Worcester, 
Principal of King's College, London. Fcap. 8vo. 2s. 6d. 
In writing these Ser7nons, it has beett the object of Ca)ion Barry to 



THEOLOGICAL BOOKS. 



set forth the deep practical importance of the doctrinal truths 
of the Atonement. ^'' The one truth,'''' says the Preface, '''"which, 
beyoml all others, I desire that these may suggest, is the inseparable 
unity IV hie h must exist betzveen Christian doctrine, even in its more 
mysterious fo7'ms, and Christian morality or devotion. They are 
a slight contribution to the plea of that connection of Religion and 
Theology, which in our own time is so freqiiently and, as it seems 
to me, so unreasonably denied.''^ The Guardian calls them '^ st?'ik- 
^7^g and eloquent lectures.^"* 

Benham.— A COMPANION TO THE LECTIONARY, 

being a Commentary on the Proper Lessons for Sundays and 
Holidays. By the Rev. W. Benham, B.D., Vicar of Margate. 
Crown 8vo. 7^-. 6d. 

This work is the result of many year s^ study oit the part of the author, 
who has sought for assistance from the works of the ablest modern 
divines. The author'' s object is to give the reader a clea^"' under- 
standing of the Lessons of the Church, which he does by means of 
general and special introductions, and critical and explanatory 
notes on all words and passages presenting the least difficulty. 

Binney.— SERMONS PREACHED . IN THE KING'S 
WEIGH HOUSE CHAPEL, 1829—69. By Thomas Binney, 
D.D. New and Cheaper Edition. Extra fcap. 8vo. 43". ^d. 

In the earnestness and vigour which characterize the sermons in this 
volume the reader will find a clue to the vast iiifluence exerted by 
Mr. Binney for forty years over a wide circle, particularly youitg 
men. In the concluding sermon, preached after the publication of 
the first editio7i, he reviews the period of his ministry as a whole, 
dwelling especially on its religious aspects. ''''Full of robust in- 
telligence, of reverent but independent ihijiking on the inost profound 
and holy themes, and of earnest practical purpose.'''' — London 
Quarterly Review. 

Bradby.— SERMONS PREACHED AT HAILEYBURY. 
By E. H. Bradby, M.A., Master. 8vo. {^Immediately. 



THEOLOGICAL BOOKS, 5 

Burgon.— A TREATISE on. the PASTORAL OFFICE. 

Addressed chiefly to Candidates for Holy Orders, or to those who 
have recently undertaken the cure of souls. By the Rev. John 
W. Burgon, M.A., Oxford. 8vo. \is. 

The object of this work is to expound the great ends to be accomplished 
by the Pastoral office, and to investigate the various means by which 
these ends may best be gained. Full directions are given as to 
preaching and sei'tnon-writing, pastoral visitatio7t, village educa- 
tion and catechising, atid conjirtnation. Under the heading of 
* * Pastoral Method''^ the author sho^os hoa.v each of the occasional 
offi-ces of the Church may be tnost properly coftducted, as well as how 
a clergyman^ s ordinary public mi)iistrations may be peiformed 
with the greatest success. The best methods of parochial manage- 
ment are examined, and an effort is rnade to exhibit the various 
elements of the true pastoral spirit. * * The^ spirit in which it 
approaches and solves practical questions is at oncefodl of common 
sense and at the same time marked by a deep rez'erential piety and 
a largeness of charity which are truly adf?iirable." — Spectator. 

Butler (G.) — Works by the Rev. GEORGE BuTLER, M.A., 
Principal of Liverpool College : 
FAMILY PRAYERS. Crown 8vo. s^- 

The prayers in this volume are all based on passages of Scripture — the 
morning prayers on Select Psalms, those for the ez'enitig on portions 
of the A^ezo Testament. 

SERMONS PREACHED in CHELTENHAM COLLEGE 
CHAPEL. Crown 8vo. 7^. 6^. 

These Sermons, twenty-nine iii number, were delivered at interz'als 
from the openi7ig of Chelte?iha7n College Chapel in 1858, to the last 
Sunday of the year 1 86 1, and contain references to the important 
events which occurred during that period — the Indian mi4ti?ty, the 
French campaigii in Italy, the liberation of Sicily and Naples, the 
establishment of the kingdotn of Italy, the American Civil War, 
and the deaths of many emi}ient men. ** These sermons a7'e plain, 

practical, and well adapted to the audito7'S We cordially 

reco7)ime7ul the volu77ie as a juodel of pulpit style, a7id for i7idividual 
a7id fafnily readi7ig." — Weekly Review. 



THEOLOGICAL BOOKS. 



Butler (Rev. H. M.)— SERMONS PREACHED in the 

CHAPEL OF HARROW SCHOOL. By H. Montagu 

Butler, Head Master. Crown 8vo. "js. 6d. 

Whilst these Sermons were p-epared to meet the wants of a special class, 

there is a constant reference in them to the great p7'inciples which 

underlie all Christian thought and action. They deal with such 

subjects as " Te?}iptation,^^ '* Courage^^^ ''^ Duty without regard to 

conseque^ices,'''' ^^ Success,^^ ^^ Devout l77ipulses" and ^^ The Soufs 

need of God." ** These sermons are adapted for every household. 

There is nothing more striking than the excellent good sense with 

which they are imbued.'''' — Spectator. 

A SECOND SERIES. Crown 8vo. ']s.ed. 

^''Excellent speciniens of what seiynons should be, — plain, direct, 
practical, pei'vaded by the true spirit of the Gospel, and holding up 
lofty aims before the minds of the you7ig." — Athenaeum. 

Butler (Rev. W. Archer). — Works by the Rev. William 
Archer Butler, M.A., late Professor of Moral Philosophy in 
the University of Dublin : — 

SERMONS, DOCTRINAL AND PRACTICAL. Edited, 
wdth a Memoir of the Author's Life, by Tho:^l\s Woodward, 
Dean of Down. With Portrait. Eighth and Cheaper Edition, 
8vo. %s. 

The following selections from the titles of the so'mons will give a fair 
idea of the contents of the volume: — ^'' The Mysteiy of the Holy 
Inca7^nation ;" *' The Daily Self Denial of Christ f " The Power 
of the Resurrection f^ ^^ Self Delusion as to our Real State before 
God;" *' The Faith of Man and the Faithfubiess of Godj" '* The 
Wedding- Garmeiit f^ * ' Human Affections Raised, 72ot Destroyed by 
the Gospel f^ " The Rest of the People of God;'''' '-''The Divi7iity of 
our Priest, P7'0phet, a7td King;" ** Church Educatio7i i7t Irela7id" 
(two Sermons). The Int7'oductory Memoir nar7'ates i7t consider- 
able detail and with 7nuch inte7'est, the eve7tts of Butler's brief life; 
and contains a few speci77iens of his poet7y, a7td a few extracts 
fro77t his addresses a7id essays, i7icluding a long and eloque7it 
passage on the P7'ovi7tce a7td Duty of the Preacher. 



THEOLOGICAL BOOKS. 



Butler (Rev. W. Archer.) — coiitinued. 

A SECOND SERIES OF SERMONS. Edited by J. A. 
Jeremie, D.D., Dean of Lincoln. Sixth and Cheaper Edition. 
8vo. 7^. 

In this volume are contained other tzuenty-six of the late Professor 
Butler'' s Sermons^ embracing a wide range of Christian topics^ as 
will be seen by the foll&iuing selection fi'ojn the titles: — ** Christ the 
Source of all Blessings f^ ** The Hope of Glory and the Charities of 
Lifef ^'The Holy Trinity ;^^ ^^ The Sorrow that Exalts and 
Sanctifies f* ^^ The Growth of the Divine Life;'''' ^^ The Folly of 
Moral Cowardice f ^^ Strength and Alission of the Chtwch f 
* ' The Blessedness of Submission ;" * * Eternal Punishment. " The 
North British Review i-^jj/j", ^^ Few sermons in our language exhibit 
the sa?7ie rare combination of excellencies ; imagery almost as rich 
as Tayloi-^s; oratory as vigorous often as South^s; judgment as 
sound as Barrow's; a style as att^-active but more copious, 
original., and forcible than Atterbury'' s ; piety as elevated as Hoive^s, 
and a fervour as intense at times as Baxter's, Mr. Butler'' s are 
the sermons of a true poet. ^'' 

LETTERS ON ROMANISM, in reply to Dr. Newman's 
Essay on Development. Edited by the Dean of Do\^ti. Second 
Edition, revised by Archdeacon Hardwick. 8vo. ioj-. dd. 

These Letters contaitz an exhaustive criticisjn of Dr. Newman^ s famous 
* * Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine. " An attempt is 
made to shezv that the theory is opposed to the received doctrine of the 
Romish Church ; that it is based on purely imaginary grounds, 
and necessarily carries with it consequences in the highest deg?-ee 
dangerous both to Christiatiity and to general truth. Whilst the 
work is mainly polemical in its character, it contains the exposition 
of many principles of far more than 7nere tefuporary interest. 
^^ A zvork which ought to be in the Library of every student of 
Divinity.^'' — Bp. St. David's. 

LECTURES ON ANCIENT PHILOSOPHY. See Scien- 
tific Catalogue. 



THEOLOGICAL BOOKS. 



Cambridge Lent Sermons. — SERMONS preached 
during Lent, 1864, in Great St. Mary's Church, Cambridge. By 
the Bishop of Oxford, Revs. H. P. Liddon, T. L. Claughton, 
J. R. Woodford, Dr. Goulburn, J. W. Burgon, T. T. 
Carter, Dr. Pusey, Dean Hook, W. J. Butler, Dean Good- 
win. Crown 8vo. 7^. 6d. 

Campbell. — Works by John M'Leod Campbell :— 
THE NATURE OF THE ATONEMENT AND ITS 

RELATION TO REMISSION OF SINS AND ETERNAL 

LIFE. Third Edition, with an Introduction and Notes. Svo. 

los. 6d. 

Three chapters of this work are devoted to the teaching of Luther on 
the subject of the Atone7?ient, and to Calvinis7?t, as taught by Dr. 
Owen and President Edwards^ and as recently modified. The 
remainder is occupied with the different aspects of the Atonement as 
conceived by the author himself the object being partly to meet the 
objections of honest inquirers, but mainly so to reveal the subject in 
its own light as to render self-evident its adaptation to the spiritual 
wants of man. Professor Rolleston, in quoting from this book in 
his address to the Biological Section of the British Association 
(Liverpool^ September, 1870J, speaks of it as ^^ the great work of 
one of the first of living theologians. " " ^ mong the first theological 
treatises of this genej^ation.'^ — Guardian. 

CHRIST THE BREAD OF LIFE. An Attempt to give 
a profitable direction to the present occupation of Thought with 
Romanism. Second Edition, greatly enlarged. Crown 8vo. 4^-. 6d. 
In this volume the Doctrines of the Infallibility of the Church and 
Transubstantiation are regarded as addressed to real imvard needs 
of humanity, and an effort is made to disengage them from the 
truths whose place they usurp, and to exhibit these truths as 
adequate to meet human cravings. The aim is, first, to offer help 
to those who feel the attractions to Romanism too strong to be over- 
come by direct arguments addressed to sense ai2d reason; and, 
second, to quicken interest in the Truth itself ' * Deserves the most 
attentive study by all who interest the?nselves in the predominant 
* religious controversy of the day. ^^ — Spectator. 



THEOLOGICAL BOOKS. 



Campbell (J. M'Leod.) — continued, 

REMINISCENCES AND REFLECTIONS, referring to 
his Early Ministry in the Parish of Row, 1825 — 31. Edited with 
an Introductory Narrative by his eldest Son, Donald Campbell, 
M.A., Chaplain of King's College, London. Crown 8vo. "js. 6d. 
The late Dr. McLeod Campbell ivas acknowledged to be a man of ex- 
ceptional gifts and earnestness, and his early life was connected 
with one of the most exciting, interesting, and important contro- 
ve7'sies that ever agitated the Church of Scotlaftd. These *' Remi- 
niscences and Reflections,^ wHtten during the last year of his life, 
zvej'e mainly hitended to place on record thoughts which might prove 
helpful to others, — and no one was more qualified to give such help 
to those who are earnestly seeking spiritual truth and peace. The 
author, i7t this ivork, deals with questions of vital viomont, in a 
way that but fei.v are qualified to do. 

Canterbury.— THE PRESENT POSITION OF THE 
CHURCH OF ENGLAND. Seven Addresses delivered to the 
Clergy and Churchwardens of his Diocese, as his Charge, at his 
Primary Visitation, 1872. By ARCHIBALD Campbell, Archbishop 
of Canterbury. Third Edition. 8vo. cloth. 3^". (>d. 
The subjects of these Addi'esses are, I. Lay Co-operation. II. Cathe- 
di'-al Reform. III. and IV. Ecclesiastical yudicature. V. Eccle- 
siastical Legislation. VI. Missionary Work of the Chtirch. VII. 
The Church of England in its relation to the Rest of Christendom. 
There are besides, a 7iumber of statistical and illustrative appendices. 

Cheyne.— Works by T. K. Cheyne, M.A., Fellow of Balliol 
College, Oxford : — 

THE BOOK OF ISAIAH CHRONOLOGICALLY AR- 
RANGED. An Amended Version, with Historical and Critical 
Introductions and Explanatory Notes. Crown 8vo. ']s. 6d. 

The object of this edition is to restore the probable meaning of Isaiah, 
so far as can be expressed in appropriate English. The basis of 
the version is the revised traitslation of 1611, but alterations have 
been introduced wherever the true sense of the p'ophecies appeared to 
require it. The Westminster Review speaks of it as ''^ a piece of 



THEOLOGICAL BOOKS. 



Cheyne (T. K.) — conthmed, 

scholarly work, very carefully and considerately done^ The 
Academy calls it ^^ a successful attempt to extend a right under- 
standing of this iinportant Old Testament writing^ 

NOTES AND CRITICISMS on the HEBREW TEXT 
OF ISAIAH. Crown 8vo. 2.s. 6d. - 

This ivork is offered as a slight contribution to a more scientific study 
of the Old Testament Scriptures, The author aims at completeness, 
independence, and originality, and constantly endeavours to keep 
philology distinct from exegesis, to explain the form without pro- 
nouncing on the matter, Saad Yah''s Arabic Version in the Bod- 
leian has been referred to, while Waltott and Buxtorf have been 
carefiilly consulted. The philological woi'ks of German critics, 
especially Ewald and Delitsch, have been anxiously and repeatedly 
studied. The h cademy calls the work * * a valuable contribution 
to the more sciottific study of the Old Testaineni.''^ 

Choice Notes on the Four Gospels, drawn from 

Old and New Sources. Crown 8vo. \s. 6d. each Vol. (St. 

Matthew and St. Mark m one Vol. price gs.). 

These Notes are selected fro??t the Rev. Prebendary Ford^s Illustrations 
of the Four Gospels, the choice being chiefly confijied to those of 
a more simple and practical character. The plan followed is to go 
over the Gospels verse by verse, -and introduce the remai^ks, mostly 
meditative and practical, of one or more noted divines, oji the vei'ses 
selected for illustration. 

Church.— SERMONS PREACHED BEFORE the UNI- 
VERSITY OF OXFORD. By the very Rev. R. W. Church, 
M. A., Dean of St. Paul's. Second Edition. Crown 8vo. 4^.6^. 
Sermons on the relations between Christianity aitd the ideas and facts 
of modern civilized society. The subjects of the various discourses 
are : — " The Gifts of Civilization, " ' ' Chrisfs Words and Christian 
Society,^'' ^^ C/ii'isfs Exa7?tple,^^ and ^^ Civilization and Religion.''' 
^^ Thoughtful and masterly. . . We regard these sermons as a 
landmai'k in religious thought. They help us to understand the 
latent strength of a Ch7'istianity that is assailed on all sides.'''' — 
Spectator. 



THEOLOGICAL BOOKS. ir 



Clay.— THE POWER OF THE KEYS. Sermons preached 

in Coventry. By the Rev. W. L. Clay, M.A. Fcap. 8vo. 3^. 6^/. 

/;/ this work an attempt is made to shew in what sense^ and to what 

extent^ the pmver of the Keys can be exercised by the layman^ the 

Churchy and the priest respectively. The Church Review says the 

sermojis are *' /;/ many 7'espects of unusual nierit.^^ 

Clergyman's Self-Examination concerning the 

APOSTLES' CREED. Extra fcap. Svo. ij-. 6./. 

** These Confessions have been wHtten by a clergyf?nanfor his aiun use. 
They speak of his ozcm unbelief Possibly they may help some of 
his bretJiren, who 7vish to judge themselves that they nmy not be 
ashamed before the Judge of all the earths 

Collects of the Church of England. With a beauti- 
fully Coloured Floral Design to each Collect, and IlUiminated 
Cover. Crown Svo. \2s. Also kept in various styles of morocco. 
The distinctive chai'acteristic of this edition is the coloured floral de- 
sign which accotjipanies each Collect, and which is generally em- 
blematical of the character of the day or saint to 7vhich it is 
assigned; the fioi.vers which have been selected are such as are likely 
to be in bloom on the day to zvhich the Collect belongs. *^ Care- 
felly, indeed livingly drazvn and daintily coloiired, " says the Pall 
Mali Gazette. The Guardian thinks it "^ successful attempt to 
associate in a natural and unforced manner the floivers of our 
fields and garde? IS with the course of the Christian year. ^^ 

Cotton. — Works by the late GEORGE Edward Lynxh 
Cotton, D.D., Bishop of Calcutta : — 
SERMONS PREACHED TO ENGLISH CONGREGA- 
TIONS IN INDIA. Crown Svo. 75. 6^. 

These Sermons are selected from those 7vhich were preached bet^veen 
the years 1S63 and 1866 to English congregations under the varied 
cii'cumstances of place and season which an Indian Bishop en- 
countei'S. * ' The sermons are models of what sa'uions should be, 
not only on account of their practical teachings, but also with 
regard to the singular felicity with which they are adapted to times, 
places, and cij'cum stances, " — Spectator. 



THEOLOGICAL BOOKS. 



Cotton (G. E. \a,)--contmti,ed. 

EXPOSITORY SERMONS ON THE EPISTLES FOR 
THE SUNDAYS OF THE CHRISTIAN YEAR. Two 
Vols. Crown 8vo. 15^". 

These hvo volumes contain in all fifty-seven Sermons. They wei'e 
all preached at variotis stations throughout India, and fro??t the 
nattti'c of the circumstances which called them forth, the varied 
subjects of which they treat are dealt with in such ct manner as is 
likely to prove acceptable to ChHstians in general. 

Cure.— THE SEVEN WORDS OF CHRIST ON THE 

CROSS. Sermons preached at St. George's, Bloomsbury. By 

the Rev. E. Capel Cure, M.A. Fcap. 8vo. 3>f. 6d. 

Of these Sermons the John Bull says, ^^ They are earnest and 

practical J "* the Nonconformist, *' The Sermons are beautiful, 

tender, and instructive f^ aizd the Spectator calls them *^A set of 

really good Sermons. " 

Curteis.— DISSENT in its RELATION to the CHURCH 
OF ENGLAND. Eight Lectures preached before the University 
of Oxford, in the year 1871, on the foundation of the late Rev. 
John Bampton, M. A. , Canon of Salisbury. By George Herbert 
Curteis, M.A., late Fellow and Sub-Rector of Exeter College; 
Principal of the Lichfield Theological College, and Prebendary of 
Lichfield Cathedral ; Rector of Turweston, Bucks. Svo. 14.?. 
In these Ba?npton Lecitwes the Author has endeavoured to acco?nplish 
three things : — /. To shew those zvho are in despair at the present 
divided aspect of Christendom, that froi7t the Apostles' time down- 
wards there has never been an age of the Church without similar 
internal conflicts ; that if well managed, these dissensions 7nay be 
kept within bounds, and made to minister to the life and movement 
of the whole polity ; but if ill- managed, they are always liable to 
become a wasting fever instead of a healthy warmth. II. To 
present materials by which CJiurchmen might be aided informing 
an intelligent and candid judgment as to what precisely these dis- 
senting denominations really are ; what it is they do, and what 
they claim to teach ; and why it is they are nozv combining to bring 



THEOLOGICAL BOOKS. 13 

the CJmrch of England^ if possible, to the ground. III. To point 
out some f CIV indications of the wonderful and every way deplorable 
misappi'ehensions which have clothed the Church of England to 
their eyes in coloicrs absolutely foreig7t to her true character ; have 
ascribed to her doctrines absolutely contrary to her meaning ; and 
have interpreted her customs in a way repellant to the Christian 
Coj?i7?ion-sense of her ozon people. 

Davies. — Works by the Rev. J. Llewelyn Davies, M.A., 

Rector of Christ Church, St. Marylebone, etc. : — 

THE WORK OF CHRIST; or, the World Reconciled to 
God. With a Preface on the Atonement Controversy. Fcap. 
8vo. 6j-. 

The reader will here find., amongst others, sermons on * ' The Joj^give- 
ness of sins,'''' '* Christ dying for men,'''' ^''Sacrifice,'''' ** The Ex- 
ample of Christ,'" '' The Baptism of Christ, "" ''The Temptation 
of Christ," '''Love, Divine and Human," *' Creation by the Word," 
''Holy Seasons" and " The Coming of the Son of Man." The 
Preface is devoted to shewing that certain popular theories of the 
Atonement are opposed to the moral sense of mankind, and are not 
imposed on Christians by statements either in the Old or New 
Testa77ients. 

SERMONS on the MANIFESTATION OF THE SON 
OF GOD. With a Preface addressed to Laymen on the present 
Position of the Clergy of the Church of England ; and an Ap- 
pendix on the Testimony of Scripture and the Church as to the 
possibility of Pardon in the Future State. Fcap. 8vo. ds. 6d. 
The Preface to this work is 7nainly occupied with the distinctio7i 
between the esse7ttial and non-essential elejnents of the Christia7i 
faith, provi7tgthat the ce7ttral I'eligious co7it7'ove7'sy of the day 7'elates, 
not, as 77iany suppose, to such questio7is as the I)tspiration of 
Sc7'ipture, but to the profouftder questio7i, whether the Son of God 
actually has been 77ia7iifested i7t the pe7'S07i of Jesus of Nazareth. 
The grou7ids 07i which the Ch7'istian bases his faith a7'e also 
exa77iined. In the Appendix the testi77i07iy of the Bible afzd the 
Anglican for77mlaries as to the possibility of pa7'don in the futu7-e 



THEOLOGICAL BOOKS. 



Davies (Rev. J. Llewelyn) — co?itinued. 

state is investigated. The sej'tnons, of ivhich the body of the work 
is composed^ treat of the great principles revealed in the words and 
acts of Jesus. ' ' This volume, both in its substance, prefix, and 
suffix, represents the noblest type of theology nozu preached in the 
English Church.^'' — Spectator. 

BAPTISM, CONFIRMATION, AND THE LORD'S 
SUPPER, as Interpreted by their Outward Signs. Three Ex- 
pository Addresses for Parochial use. Fcap. 8vo., limp cloth. 
IS. 6d. 

TJie method adapted in these addresses is to set forth the nattiral and 
historical mea^ting of the signs of the two Sacraments and of Con- 
firmation, and thus to arrive at the spirittial realities which they 
symbolize. The work touches on all the principal elements of a 
Christian man^ s faith, 

THE EPISTLES of ST. PAUL TO TPIE EPHESIANS, 
THE COLOSSIANS, and PHILEMON. With Introductions 
and Notes, and an Essay on the Traces of Foreign Elements in 
the Theology of these Epistles. 8vo. "js. 6d. 

The chief aim of the translations and notes in the present volume is 
simply to bring out as accurately as possible the apostle's mea^ting. 
The General Introduction, treats mainly of the time and circimi- 
stances in which Paul is believed to have zuritten these Epistles. 
To each Epistle there is a special ci'itical introduction. 

MORALITY ACCORDING TO THE SACRAMENT 
OF THE LORD'S SUPPER. Crown 8vo. 3^. 6^. 

These discotirses were preached before the University of Cambridge. 
They form a contimious exposition, and are directed juaiizly against 
the twofold danger zvhich at present threatens the Church — the 
tendency, on the one hand, to regard Morality as iitdependent of 
Religion, and, on the other, to ignore the fact that Religion finds 
its proper sphere and criterion in the moral life. 



THEOLOGICAL BOOKS. 



Davies (Rev. J. Llewelyn) — cotitinued. 

THE GOSPEL and MODERN LIFE. Sermons on some 
of the Difficulties of the Present Day, with a Preface on a Recent 
Phase of Deiom. Extra fcap. 8vo. 6^. 

The '■'' recent phase of Deism'''' examined in the preface to this volume 
is that pi'ofessed by the ''Tall Mall Gazette'^ — th'at in the sphere of 
Religion there are one or two '"''probable sjippositions,^^ but nothing 
f?iore. The writer starts with an assumption that mankind are 
under a Divine discipline, and in the light of this conviction passes 
under rei'ieiv the leading religiotts problems which perplex thought- 
ful minds of the present day. Ainongst other subjects exami?ied 
are — '■^Christ and Modern Knowledge,^^ '''' Hujuanity and the 
Trinity, " ' * Nature, " * * Religioii, " * * Conscience, " * * Human 
Cori'uption,'''' and ^^ Human Holiness." ^^ There is probably no 
writer in the Church fairer or more thoroughly zijorth listening to 
than Mr. Lleivellyn Davies, and this book luill do more than sustain 
his already high reputation.'^'' — Globe. 

De Teissier. — Works by G. F. Be Teissier, B.D.:— 
VILLAGE SERMONS, First Series. Crown 8vo. ()s. 
This volitrne contains fifty four short Seimons, embracing many sub- 
jects of practical importance to all Christians. The Guardian says 
they are '*« little too scholarlike in style for a coitntry village, 
but sound and practical." 

VILLAGE SERMONS, Second Series. Crown 8vo. Si*. 6^. 

' ' This second volume of Parochial Sermons is given to the public 

in the humble hope that it may afford viany seasotiable thoughts 

for such as are Alourners in Zion." There are in all fifty -tiva 

Sermons embracing a wide variety of subjects connected with 

Ch ristia n faith a nd practice. 

THE HOUSE OF PRAYER ; or, a Practical Exposition 
of the Order for Morning and Evening Prayer in the Church of 
England. i8mo. extra cloth. \s. 6d. 

'* There is in these addresses to the Christum reader,'''' says the If Pro- 
duction, an attempt to set forth the devotional spirit of our Church 



THEOLOGICAL BOOKS. 



in her daily forms of Morning and Evening Prayer, by shewijig 
hmv all the parts of them may have a just bearing upon Christian 
practice, and so may have a deep influence upon the conduct of all 
our honest luorshippers, tutder every possible relation and circum- 
stance of life.'' ^ ^Eor a certain dez'out tenderrtess of feeling and 
religious earnestness of pnirpose, this little book of Mr. De Teissiei'^s 
is really notewoj'thy ; and it is a book ivhich grows upon you 
very much when you r^^^ ?'/'."— Literary Churchman. 

Ecce Homo. A Survey of the Life and Work of 
Jesus Christ. 23rd Thousand. Crown 8vo. ds. 

*M very original and reniarkable book, full of striking thought and 
delicate perception; a book which has realised with wonderful 
vigour and freshness the historical magnitude of Chris fs work, and 
which hei'e and there gives us readings of the finest kind of the 
pi'obable motive of His individual words and actions.''^ — Spectator. 
** The best and most established believer will find it adding some 
fresh buttresses to his faith ^ — Literary Churchman. ^^ If ive 
have not misunderstood him, we have before us a writer who has 
a right to claim deference from those who think deepest and know 
most. " — Guardian. 

Faber.— SERMONS AT A NEW SCHOOL. By the Rev. 
Arthur Faber, M.A., Head Master of Malvern College. Cr. 
8vo. [Immediately. 

Farrar.— Works by the Rev. F. W. Farrar, M.A., F.R.S., 

Head Master of Marlborough College, and Hon. Chaplain to the 
Queen : — 

THE FALL OF MAN, AND OTHER SERMONS. 
Second and Cheaper Edition. Extra fcap. 8vo. 45-. 6d. 

This volume contains twenty Sermons. No attempt is made in 
these sermons to develope a system of doctrine. In each discourse 
some one aspect of truth is taken up, the chief object being to point 
out its bearings on prcu:tical religious life. The Nonconfomiist 
says of these Sermons, — ^^Mr. Farrar' s Sermons are almost perfect 
speciinens of oiu type of Sermons, which we may concisely call 



THEOLOGICAL BOOKS, 17 

Farrar (Rev. F. W.) — continued. 

beautiful , The style of expression is beautiful — there is beauty in 
the thoughts^ the illustrations^ the allusions — they are expressive of 
genuinely beautiful perceptions and feelings ^ The British Quar- 
terly says, — ^^ Ability, eloquence, scholarship, and practical useful- 
ness, are in these Sermons cotnbined in a very unusual degree. " 

THE WITNESS OF HISTORY TO CHRIST. Being 
the Hulsean Lectures for 1870. New Edition. Crown 8vo. 5^. 
The copious notes co7itain many references which will be found of 
great use to the enquiring stiident. The following are the subjects 
of the Five Lectures: — /. ^^ The Antecedent Credibility of the 
Miraculous.^'' II. ^' The Adequacy of the Gospel Records.^'' 
HI. ^^ The Victories of Ch7'istianity.^'' IV. ^^Christianity and 
the Individual.''^ V. ^^Christianity and the Race.^^ The subjects 
of the four Appendices are: — A. " The Diversity of Christian 
Evidences. ^^ B. ^^ Confucius. ^^' C. ^^ Buddha.'''' D. ^^ Comte.^^ 

SEEKEkS AFTER GOD. The Lives of Seneca, Epictetus, 
and Marcus Aurelius. See Sunday Library at end of Catalogue. 

Fellowship : Letters Addressed to my Sister 
Mourners. Fcap. Svo. cloth gilt. y. 6d. 

*^A beautiful little volume, written with genuine feeling, good taste, 
a7id a right appreciation of the teaching of Scripture relative to 
sorrow and suffering.^'' — Nonconformist. ''^A very touching, and 
at the same time a very sensible book. It breathes throughout the 
truest Christian spiiit.^'' — Contemporary Review. 

Forbes.— THE VOICE OF GOD IN THE PSALMS. 
By Granville Forbes, Rector of Broughton. Cr. Svo. 6^-. 6d. 
This volu?7te contains a connected seines of tzuenty Sej'mons, divided 
into three pai'ts, the tzuo first parts being Introductory. Purt I. 
treats of the ^^ Ground of Faith," a fid consists of four Ser??ions on 
''^ Faith in God,^^ ^^God^s Voice within us," ^^ Faith in God the 
Ground of Faith in the Bible," and '''"God's Voice in the Bible." 
Part II. treats of'''' The Voice of God in the Law and the Prophets," 
on which there are four Sermons; and Part III., occupying the 

2 



i8 THEOLOGICAL BOOKS. 

greater part of the volume^ deals itith ^^ The Voice of God in the 
Psalms ^''^ and consists of twelve Sermons. The last Sermon is 
on * ' The Voice of God in History. " 

Gifford.— THE GLORY OF GOD IN MAN. By E. H. 
GiFFORD, D.D. Fcap. 8vo., cloth. 3^. dd. 

" The serinons are shorty thoughtful, and earnest discussions of the 
weighty matter involved in the sicbjects of them.^'' — ^Journal of 
Sacred Literature. 

Golden Treasury Psalter. See p. 50. 

Hardwick. — Works by the Ven. Archdeacon Hardwick : 

CHRIST AND OTHER MASTERS. A Historical Inquiry 
into some of the Chief Parallelisms and Contrasts between Christ- 
ianity and the Religious Systems of the Ancient World. New 
Edition, revised, and a Prefatoiy Memoir by the Rev. Francis 
Procter, M. A. Two vols, crown 8vo. 150. 
After sevei'al introductory chapte7's dealing with the religions tendencies 
of the present age, the unity of the hiwian race, and the character- 
istics of Religion under the Old Testainent, the Author proceeds to 
consider the Religions of India, China, America, Oceanica, Egypt, 
and Medo- Persia. The history attd charactei'istics of these Religions 
are examined, and an effort is made to_ bring out the points of 
difference and affiJtity between them and Christianity. The object 
is to establish the perfect adaptation of the latter faith to human 
nature in all its phases and at all times. " The plan of the work 
is boldly and almost nobly co7iceived. . . We comme^td the work to 
the pei'usal of all those who take interest in the siudy of ajicient 
mythology, without losing their reverercce for the supreme authority 
of the oracles of the living God." — Christian Observer. 

A HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. Middle 
Age. From Gregory the Great to the Excommunication of Luther, 
Edited by William Stubbs, M.A., Regius Professor of Modern 
History in the University of Oxford. With Four ]Maps constructed 
for this work by A. Keith Johnston. Third Edition. Crown 
8vo. los. 6d. 
Although the ground-plan of this treatise coincides in many point. ^ 



THEOLOGICAL BOOKS. 19 

Hardwick (Archd.) — continued. 

ivith that of the colossal zvork of Schrdckh, yet in arranging the 
materials a very different course has frequently been pursued. 
With regard to his opinions the late author avowed distinctly that 
he construed history with the specific prepossessions of an English- 
man and a member of the English Church, The reader is con- 
stantly referi'ed to the authorities^ both original and critical, on 
which the statements are founded. For this edition Professor 
Stubbs has carefully rezised both text and notes, making such cor- 
rections of facts, dates, and the like as the results of recent research 
warratit. The doctrirml, historical, and generally speculative, 
views of the late author have been preserved intact. * ^As a Maiuial 
for the student of ecclesiastical history iri the Middle Ages, we know 
no English work which can be compared to Mr. Hardzvick^ s book. " 
— Guardian. 

A HISTORY of the CHRISTIAN CHURCH DURING 
THE REFORMATION. New Edition, revised by Professor 
Stubbs. Crown Svo. ioj-. 6^. 

This volume is intended as a sequel and companion to the ''^History 
of the Christian Church during the Middle Age. " The author'' s 
earnest wish has been to give the reader a trustworthy version of 
those stirring incidents which mark the Reformatio7t period, with- 
out relinquishing his former claim to characterise peculiar systems, 
persons, and events accoi'ding to the shades and colours they as- 
sunie, when contemplated f'om an English point of view, and by a 
member of the Church of England. 

Hervey.— THE GENEALOGIES OF OUR LORD AND 

SAVIOUR JESUS CHRIST, as contained in the Gospels of 

St. Matthew and St. Luke, reconciled with each other, and shown 

to be in harmony with the true Chronology of the Times. By Lord 

Arthur Hervey, Bishop of Bath and \\'ells. Svo. loj-. 6d. 

The difficulties and importance of the subject are first stated, the three 

main points of inquiry being clearly brought out. The Author 

then proceeds to shew that the genealogies of St. Matthezv's and 

St. Luke's Gospels are both genealogies oj Joseph, and examines 

the principle on which they are framed. In the follozuing chapter's 

the re?nai}iing aspects of the subject are exhaust iz'ely investigated. 



30 THEOLOGICAL BOOKS, 

Hymni Ecclesise. — Fcap. 8vo. ^s, 6d. 

A selection of Latin Hymns of the Mediceval Churchy containing 
selections f'oin the Paris Breviary^ and the Breviaines of Rome^ 
Salisbury^ and Yo?'k. The selection is confined to such holy days 
and seasons as are recognised by the Church of England^ and to 
special events or things recorded in Scripture, This collection was 
edited by Dr. N'rcvman luhile he lived at Oxford, 

Kempis, Thos. A. — DE IMITATIONE CHRISTI. 

LiBRi IV. Borders in the Ancient Style, after Holbein, Diirer, 
and other Old Masters, containing^ Dances of Death, Acts of 
Mercy, Emblems, and a variety of curious ornamentations. In 
white cloth, extra gilt. *]s. 6d. 

The original Latin text has been here faithfully reproduced. The 
Spectator says of this edition^ it ^^ has many solid 7nerits^ and is 
perfect in its way. " While the Athenaeum says, ' ' The ivhole work 
is admirable; so?ne of the figure compositions have extraordinary 
7ne)'it.^^ 

Kingsley. — Works by the Rev. Charles Kingsley, M.A., 
Rector of Eversley, and Canon of Chester. (For other Works 
by the same author, see Historical and Belles Lettres 
Catalogues). 

The high mejdts of Mr. Kingsley s Sermons are acknowledged. 
Whether preached to the rustic audience of a village Church or to 
the princely congregatio7i of the Chapel Royal, these Sermons are 
invariably characterized by intense earnestness and magnanimityy 
combined with genuine charity and winning tenderness ; the style 
is always clear, simple, and unaffectedly natural, abotinding in 
beautiful illust7'ation, the fruit of a rich fancy and a cultivated 
taste. They are emphatically practical. 

THE WATER OF LIFE, AND OTHER SERMONS. 

Second Edition. Fcap. 8vo. 3^-. 6^. 

This voliune contains twenty-one Serinons pi'ea^hed at various places 
— Westf?iinster Abbey, Chapel Royal, before the Queen at Windsor, 
etc. The following are a few of the titles : — * ' The Water of Life; ' ' 
''The Wages of Sin;'' '' The Battle of Life;'' ''Ruth;" "Friend- 



THEOLOGICAL BOOKS. 21 



Kingsley (Rev. C.) — co7itinued, 

skip, or David a nd Jonathan ; " * ''Progress ; " * ''Faith ; " ^''The 
Meteor Shower'' (1866); ''Cholera'' (1866); ''The God of 
Nattire. " 

VILLAGE SERMONS. Seventh Edition. Fcap. 8vo. 3^-. 6^. 
The following are a few of the titles of these Sermons : — "God's 
World;" "Religion not Godliness ;" "Self Destruction ;" "Hell 
071 Earth;" " Noah' s Justice ;" " Our Father in Heaven ;'"* "The 
Tra nsfigtiration ;" " The Crucifixion ;" " The Resiirrection ; ' ' 
' ' Improvement ; " " On Books ;" "The Courage of the Saviour, ' ' 

THE GOSPEL OF THE PENTATEUCH. Second 
Edition. Fcap. 8vo. 3^-. 6^. 

This volume consists of eighteen Sermons on passages taken fr 0771 the 
Pentateuch, They are dedicated to Dean Stanley out of g7'atitude 
for his Lectures on the Jewish Church, under the influence and in 
the spirit of which they we7'e writte7t. ' ' With your book in my 
hand^ " Mr. Kingsley says in his Preface^ ' ' I have tried to write 
a few plai7i Ser77t07ts, telli7tg plain people what they will find in the 
Pentateuch. I have told the77i that they zvill find i7i the Bible, and 
in no other ancient book, that livi7ig working God, who7n their 
reason and conscience dema7td; and that they will fi7td that He is 
none other than Jesus Christ otir Lo7'd." 

GOOD NEWS OF GOD. Fourth Edition. Fcap. 8vo. 

Zs. 6d, 

This vohi77ie contains thirty -ni7te short Se7^77i07ts, preached in the 
07'dinary course of the authoi"' s parochial 77ii7iistrations. A few of 
the titles are — " The Beatific Vision;" " The Life of God;" "The 
So7ig of the Th7'ee Child7^en;" "Worship;" "De Profundis;" 
"The Pace of Life;" "Heroes and He7'oi7ies ;" "Music;" 
"Christ's Boyhood;" "Hu77ian Nature;" "True Prude7ice ;" 
"The Te77iper of Christ;" "Our Deserts;" "The Lofti7iess of 
God." 

SERMONS FOR THE TIMES. Third Edition. Fcap. 
8vo. 33". (yd, 
He7'e are twenty-ttvo Ser7nons, all bca7'i7ig 7no7'e or less 07t the roe7y' 



THEOLOGICAL BOOKS. 



Kingsley (Rev. C.) — continued. 

day life of the present day, including such subjects as these : — 
^^ Fathers and Children;'''' **^ Good Conscience f ^^ Names f' 
^''Sponsorship f ^'' Duty and Superstition f^ ^^ England'' s Strength;'''' 
^^ The Lord's Prayer ;^^ ^^ Shame;''' ^E'^orgiveness''^ ;" The True 
Gentleman;'" '^Public Spirit.'^ 

TOWN AND COUNTRY SERMONS. Second Edition. 
Extra fcap. 8vo. 3^-. 6d. % 

Some of these Sermons were preached before the Queen, and some in 
the performance of the writer's ordinary parochial duty. There are 
thirty -nine in all, under such titles as the following : — ^^Hozv to keep 
Passion- Week;" "^ Soldier's Training;" ^^Turning-points;"" 
''Work;" " The Rock of Ages ;" *' The Loftiness of Humility ;" 
" The Central Sun;" *' Ev Toutw Nt/ca ;" *' The Eternal Man- 
hood;''"' 'Hypocrisy;" " The Wrath of Love." Of these Sermons 
the Nonconformist says, *' They are warm with the fervour of the 
preacher'' s own heart, and strong from the force of his own con- 
victions. There is nowhere an attempt at display, and the clear- 
ness and simplicity of the style make them suitable for the youngest 
or most unintelligent of his hearers." 

SERMONS on NATIONAL SUBJECTS. Second Edition. 
Fcap. 8vo. y. 6d. 

THE KING OF THE EARTH, and other Sermons, 
a Second Series of Sermons on National Subjects, Second 
Edition. Fcap. 8vo. 3J'. 6d. 

The following extract from the Pi^eface to the 2nd Series ivill explain 
the preachcT^ s aim in these Seri7ions : — " I have tried to pro- 
claim the Lord fesus Christ, as the Scriptures, both in their 
strictest letter and in their general method, frofn Genesis to Reve- 
lation, seem to me to proclaim Him ; not merely as the Saviour of 
a few elect souls, hut as the light and life of every human bei7ig 
who enters into the world ; as the source of all reason, strength, 
and virtue in heathen or in Christian; as the King and Ruler of 



THEOLOGICAL BOOKS, 23 

Kingsley (Rev. C.) — continued. 

the ivhole tiniversey and of every nation^ family^ and man on 
eat^h ; as the Redeemer of the whole earth and the whole htiman 

race His deaths as a ftill^ perfect^ and sufficient sacrifice^ 

oblation^ and satisfaction for the sins of the whole world ^ by which 
God is reconciled to the whole hiimaii ?'ace. 

DISCIPLINE, AND OTHER SERMONS. Fcp. 8vo. 3^.6^. 
Herein are twenty-four Sermons preached on various occasions, sof?ie 
of them of a public natiire — at the Volufiteer Camp, Wimbledon, 
before the Prince of Wales at Sandringham, at Wellington College, 
etc. A few of the titles are — ''^ Disciplined"^ (to Volunteers); 
^^ Prayer and Science ;^^ *''' False Civilization;'''' ^^ The End of 
Religion;'' " The Humanity of God ;''' ''God's World;''' ''Self- 
Help;" "Toleration;" " The Likeness of God." This volume 
the Nonconformist calls, — " Eminently practical and appropriate 

Earnest stirring words." The Guardian says, — "There is 

much thought, tejidemess, and devout ness of spirit in these Sermons, 
and some of them are models both in matter and expressioji." 

DAVID. Four Sermons : David's Weakness — David's 
Strength — David's Anger — David's Deserts. Fcap. 8vo. 2s. 6d. 
These four Sermons were preached before the University of Cam- 
bridge, and are specially addressed to young men. Their titles are^ 
— "David's Weakness ;" "David's St7^e7igth ;" "David's Anger ;" 
"David's Deserts." The Freeman says — "Every pai'agraph 
glows zvith manly enei'gy, delivers straightforward practical truths, 
in a vigorous, sometimes even passionate way, arid exhibits an 
intense sympathy with everything honest, pure^ and noble. " 

Lightfoot. — Works by J. B. LiGHTFOOT, D.D., Hulsean 
Professor of Divinity in the University of Cambridge ; Canon of 
St. Paul's. 
ST. PAUL'S EPISTLE TO THE GALATIANS. A Re- 
vised Text, with Introduction, Notes, and Dissertations. Third 
Edition, revised. 8vo. cloth. 12s. 
The subjects treated in t/i£ Introduction are— the Galatian people, the 



24 THEOLOGICAL BOOKS. 

Lightfoot (Dr. J. B.) — cont'umed. 

Churches of Galatia^ the date and gen7imeitess of the Epistle, and 
its character and contents. The dissertations discuss the question 
whether the Galatians luere Celts or Tartars^ and the whole subject 
of "■ The Brethren of the Lord,"" arid ''St. Paul and the Three.'' 
While the Asithor's object has been to make this commentary 
generally complete, he has paid special attention to everything re- 
lating to St. PauVs personal history and hi^ intercourse with the 
Apostles and Church of the Circumcision, as it is this feature in 
the Epistle to the Galatians which has given it an overzvhelming 
interest in recent theological controversy. The Spectator says 
''there is no commentator at once of sounder judginent and more 
libe?^al than Br. Lightfoot. '' 

ST. PAUL'S EPISTLE TO THE PHILIPPIANS. A 
Revised Text, with Introduction, Notes, and Dissertations. Second 
Edition. 8vo. I2s. 

The plan of this volume is the same as that of " The Epistle to the 
Galatians. " The Introduction deals with the following subjects : 
— "St. Paul in Ro^ne,"" " Order of the Epistles of the Captivity,"" 
' ' The Church ofPhilippi, " ' ' Character and Contents of the Epistle,'" 
and its genuineness. The Bisse7'tations are on " The Christian 
Ministry," "St. Paul and Seneca" and " The Letters of Paul 
and Seneca." "No commentary in the English laitguage can be 
co?npared with it in regard to fulness of information, exact 
scholarship, and laboured attempts to settle everything about the 
epistle on a solid foundation." — Athen^um. "Its author blertds 
laige and varied learning with a style as bright and easy, as telling 
and artistic, as that of our most accoinplished essayists," — Non- 
conformist. 

ST. CLEMENT OF ROME, THE TWO EPISTLES TO 
THE CORINTHIANS. A Revised Text, with Introduction 
and Notes. 8vo. %s. 6d. 

This volume is the first part of a complete edition of the Apostolic 
Bathers. The Introductions deal with the questions of the genuine- 
ness and authenticity of the Epistles, discuss their date and character^ 



THEOLOGICAL BOOKS, 25 

Lightfoot (Dr. J. B.) — continued, 

and analyse their contents. An account is also given of all the 
different epistles which bear the name of Clement of Rome. ^*By 
far the most copiously annotated edition of St. Clement which we 
yet possess, a fid the most convenioit in every way for the English 
reader. " — Guardian. 

ON A FRESH REVISION OF THE ENGLISH NEW 
TESTAMENT. Second Edition. Crown 8vo. ds. 

The Author begins with a fezu words on S. Jerome'' s revision of the 
Latin Bible, and then goes on to shew in detail the necessity for 
a fresh rez'ision of the authorized version on the follozuing grounds : 
— I. False Readings. 2. Artificial distinctioyis created. 3. Real 
distinctions obliterated. 4. Fatilts of Grammar. 5. Faults of 
Lexicography. 6. Treat jnent of Proper Names, official titles, etc. 
7. Archaisms, defects in the English, errors of the press, etc. 
The volume is completed by (i) a 71 elaboi'ate appendix on the words 
iirioixrios and iref/Lovcrios, (2) a table of passages of Scripture 
quoted, and (^) a general index. *' The booh is marked by carefid 
scholarship, familiarity with the subject, sobriety, ajid circumspec- 
tion." — Athenaeum. ^^ It abounds with ezidence of the most ex- 
tensive learning, and of a inasterly familiarity with the best results 
of modern Greek scholarship." — Standard. 

Luckock.— THE TABLES OF STONE. A Course of 
Sermons preached in All Saints' Church, Cambridge, by H. M. 
Luckock, M.A., Vicar. Fcap. 8vo. 3^-. 6^/. 

Sermons illustrative of the great principles of morality, mostly based 
on texts f 7-0 m the A^ew Testament Scriptures. 

Maclaren.— SERMONS PREACHED at MANCHESTER. 
By Alexander Maclaren. Third Edition. Fcap. Svo. 4^. dd. 

These Sermotts, ti.ve}ityfour in number, are well knoivn for the 
freshness and vigour of their thought, and the wealth of imagination 
they display. They represent 710 special school, but deal with the 
broad principles of Christ ia 71 truth, especially iti their beari7ig Q71 



THEOLOGICAL BOOKS. 



Maclaren {A.)~contmued. 

practical, ei>ery day life. A few of the titles a7'e: — *' The Stone of 
Stumblifig,''^ ^^ Love and Forgive^tess,'*'' '''The Living Dead,'''' 
'^ Memory in Another World,''^ '''Faith in Christ,'''' ''Love and 
Fear;' " The Choice of Wisdom;' " The Food of the World.'' 

A SECOND SERIES OF SERMONS. Second Edition. 

Fcap. 8vo. 4J'. 6d. 

This 2nd Series, consisting of nineteen Sermons, are marked by the 
same characteristics as the 1st. The Spectator characterises them 
as "vigorous in style, fidl of thought, rich in illustration, and in 
an unusttal degree interesting''' 

Maclear.— Works by G. F. Maclear, D.D., Head Master of 

King's College School : — 

A CLASS-BOOK OF OLD TESTAMENT HISTORY. 

With Four Maps. Sixth Edition. i8mo. 4^-. 6^. 

^' The present volume," says the Preface, "forms a Class-Book of Old 
Testament History from the Earliest Times to those of Ezra and 
Nehemiah. In its preparation the most recent authorities have 
been cojzsulted, aud wherever it has appeared useful. Notes have 
been subjoined illustrative of the Text, and, for the sake of more 
advanced students, references added to larger works. The Index 
has been so a^'ranged as to form a concise Dictionary of the Persons 
and Places mentioned in the course of the Narrative." The Maps, 
prepared by Stanford, materially add to the value and usefuhiess 
of the book. The British Quarterly Review . r^Z/j" it "A careful 
and elaborate, though hnef co7npendium of all that modern research 
has done for the illustration of the Old Testament. We know of 
no work which contains so 77i2ich iinportant information in so small 
a compass." 

A CLASS-BOOK OF NEW TESTAMENT HISTORY. 

Including the Connexion of the Old and New Testament. Fourth 
Edition. i8mo. 5^-. 6d. 

The present volume forms a sequel to the Author's Class-Book of 
Old Testament History, and continues the nan^ative to the close of 



i 



THEOLOGICAL BOOKS, 27 

Maclear (G. F.) — continued, 

St. PaiiPs second imprisonment at Rome. It is ^narked by the 
same characteristics as the former ivork^ and it is hoped that it may 
proz'e at once a useful Class-Book and a convenient companion to 
the study of the G?'eek Testament. The work is divided into three 
Books — /. TJie Connection between the Old and Nezu Testaments. 
II. The Gospel History, III The Apostolic History. In the 
Appendix are given Chronological Tables The Clerical Journal 
says^ ' ' // is not often that such an amount of useful and inter- 
esting matter on biblical subjects, is found in so convenient a?id 
small a compass, as in this well-arranged vohune.^^ 

A CLASS-BOOK OF THE CATECHISM OF THE 
CHURCH OF ENGLAND. Second Edition. iSmo. cloth. 
2s. 6d. 

The present work is intended as a sequel to tJie two preceding books, 
* ' Like them, it is JurnisJied with notes and references to larger 
works, and it is hoped that it inay be found, especially in the higher 
forms of our Public Schools, to supply a suitable manual of in- 
struction in the chief doctrines of our Church, and a useful help 
iyi the preparation of Candidates for Confirmation.^'' TJie Author 
goes aver the Church Catechism clause by clause, and gives all 
7ieedful explanation and illustration, doctrinal, practical, and 
historical; the Notes make the work especially valuable to the student 
and clergyman. Appended are a General Index, an Index 
of Greek and Latin IFords, and an Index of tJie Words ex- 
plained thj'oughout the book. The Literary Churchman says, 
^^ It is indeed the work of a scholar and divine, and as such, though 
extremely simple, it is also extremely instructive. There ai'e few 
cle?gy who would not find it usefid in preparing candidates for 
Confirjnation ; and there are not a few who would find it useful to 
themselves as well. " 

A FIRST CLASS-BOOK OF THE CATECHISM OF 

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND, with Scripture Proofs for 

Junior Classes and Schools. Second Edition. iSmo. dd. 

This" is an epitojne of the lajger Class-book, meant for junior students 

and elementary classes. The book has been carefully cotidensed, so 



28 THEOLOGICAL BOOKS. 

Maclear (G. F.) — conti?iued. 

as to contain dearly and fully ^ the ?7tost important part of the 
contents of the largei' book. Like it the present Manual is sub- 
dimded into five pai'ts, each part into a nu?nber of sho7't chapters, 
one or more of which ??iight form a suitable lesson, and each 
chapter is subdivided in a number of sections, each with a pro- 
7ninent title indicative of its contents. It will be found a valuable 
JSIaniial to all who are co7tce7'ned with the religious t7'aini7ig of 
childre7i. *»• 

A SHILLING-BOOK of OLD TESTAMENT HISTORY. 
i8mo. cloth limp. \s. 

This Alajiual bears the sa7ne 7'elatio7t to the la7ger Old Testa77ient 
IIisto7y, that the book just 77te7itioned does to the larger wo7'k on the 
Catechis77t. As i7t it, the S77iall-type 7iotes have been 077iitted, and 
a clear and full epitome given of the la7'ger wo7'k. It consists of 
Ten Books, divided i7tto short chapters, and subdivided i7zto sections, 
each sectio7t t7'eati7tg of a single episode in the histo7y, the title of 
which is give7t i7t bold type. The Map is clearly p7'i7zted, a7id not 
overcrowded with 7ia77ies. 

A SHILLING-BOOK of NEW TESTAMENT HISTORY. 
l8mo. cloth limp. is. 

This bears the sa7ne 7'elatio7i to 'the la7ger Nro) Testame7tt History 
that the wo7'k just 77ientioned has to the la7ge Old Testament 
History, a7id is 77ia7'ked by si77iilar characte7'istics. 

THE ORDER OF CONFIRMATION. A Sequel to the 
Class-Book of the Church Catechism, with Prayers and Collects. 
i8mo. 3^. 

The 07'der of Confij-mation is given i7tfodl, after which the Ma7iual 
is divided into seve7i brief chapters: — /. *' The Mcafmig of Co7t- 
fii'7natio7z.^^ II. " The 0)'igi7t of Confir77iatio7Z." HI, IV., 
V. ^^ The 07'der of Co77fir77iatio7t,^^ t7'eati7tg, (i) of '' The Bi- 
te7'rogation and A7tswer," (2) ^^ The Iayi7ig on of Ha77ds,^^ 
(3) ''The P7'aye7's a7id Benediction,'' VI. ''The Holy Co7n- 
munion. " Chapter VII co?isists of a few suitable P7'ayers and 



THEOLOGICAL BOOKS, 29 

Maclear (G. F.) — continued. 

Collects intended to be used by the candidate during the days of 
preparation for Confirmation. The Literary Churchman calls it 
^^An admirable Manual . Thoroughly sound, clear, and co?nplete 
in its teaching, with so?ne good, clear, personal advice as to Holy 
Communion, and a good selection of prayers and collects for those 
preparing for Confirmatioit. " 

Macmillan.— Works by the Rev. Hugh Macmillan. (For 
other Works by the same Author, see Catalogue of Travels 
and Scientific Catalogue). 

THE TRUE VINE; or, the Analogies of our Lord's 

Allegory. Second Edition. Globe 8vo. 6s. 

This work is not merely an exposition of the fifteenth chapter of 
St. John^s Gospel, but also a general parable of spiritual truth 

' from the world of plants. It describes a fezu of the points in 
which the varied realm of vegetable life cof?ies into contact with the 
higher spiritual realm, and shews how rich a field of pro??nse lies 
before the analogical mind in this direction. The majority of the 
analogies are dei'ived from the grape-vine ; but the whole range 
of the vegetable kingdoin is laid under contribution for appropriate 
illustration. Indeed, Mr. Alacmillan has brought into his service 
many of the results of recent scientific and historic research and 
biblical criticism; as well as the discoveries of travellers ancient 
and modern. The work will thus be found not only admirably 
suited for devotional reading, but also full of valuable and varied 
instruction. The Nonconformist J<2yj', ^'' It abounds in exquisite 
bits of descriptio7t, and in striJdng facts clearly stated.^^ The 
British Quarterly says, ^''Readers and preachers luho are tin- 
scientific will find 7nany of his illustrations as valuable as they 
are beautijul. '' 

BIBLE TEACHINGS IN NATURE. Seventh Edition. 
Globe 8vo. 6j". 

In this volume the author has endeavoured to sheiu that the teaching 
of nature and the teaching of the Bible are directed to the sarne 
great end; that the Bible contaiyis the spiritual t? uths which are 



30 THEOLOGICAL BOOKS, 

Macmillan (H.) — continued. 

necessary to make us linse unto salvation ^ and the objects and scenes 
of nature aie the pictures by which tJiese truths are illustrated. 
Tlie first eight chapters describe, as it luere, the extenor appeai'ance 
of nature^ s temple — the gorgeous, viany-colouj'cd cuj-tain hanging 
before the shrine. The last seven cluipters bring us into the 
interior — the holy place, where is seen the very core of sytnbolical 
ordinances. ^^ He has made the world more beaiitiful to us, and 
ujisealed our ears to voices of praise and messages of love that might 
othemnse have been unheard. ^^ — British Quarterly-Review. *'J/;-. 
Macmillan has produced a book which may be fitly described as one 
of the happiest efforts for enlisting physical science in the direct 
service of religion. " — Guardian. 

THE MINISTRY OF NATURE. Second Edition. Globe 

Svo. (is. 

Mr. Macmillan believes that nature has a spiritual as well as a 
material side, — that she exists not only for tJie natural uses of the 
body, but alsofw the sustenance of the life of the soul. This higlier 
ministjy, the author believes, explains all the beauty and wonder of 
the world, which would often be superfluous or extravagant. In 
this volume of fourteen cJmpters the Author attempts to inter pi'et 
Nature on her religious side in accordance with tJie most recent 
discoz'CJ'ies of physical science, and to sJiew Jiow much gi'eater 
significance is impa7'ted to many passages of Scripture and many 
doctrines of Christianity when looked at in the light of these dis- 
coz'eries. Instead of regai'ding Physical Science as antagonistic to 
Chi'istianity, the Author believes and seeks to shew that eve?y fiew 
discovery tends more sti'ongly to pi'ove that Nature and tlie Bible 
have One Author. ** Whether the reader agree or not with his 
conclusions, he will acknowledge he is in the presence of an original 
and thoughtful writer. ^^ — Pall Mall Gazette. ** There is no class 
of educated men and wo??ie?i that will 7iot profit by these essay s.^"* — 
Standard. 

M^Cosh.— For Works by James McCosk, LL.D.. President 
of Princeton College, New Jersey, U.S., see Philosophical 
Catalogue. 



THEOLOGICAL BOOKS. 31 

Maurice. — Works by the late Rev. F. Denison Maurice, 

M.A., Professor of Moral Philosophy in the University of Cam- 
bridge. 

Professor Maurice^ s Works arc recognized as hazing made a deep 
impression on modern theology. With whatez^er subject he dealt 
he tried to look at it in its bearing on liznng men and their ei'ery- 
day surroundings^ and faced unshrinkingly the difficulties zvhich 
occur to ordinary earnest thinkers in a man7ier that showed he had 
intense sympathy with all that concerns humanity. By all zvho 
wish to understand the various drifts of thought during the present 
century^ Mr. Maurice's works must be studied. An intimate 
friend of Mr. Maurice's^ one who has carefully studied all his 
works, and had besides many opportunities of kno^wing the Author' s 
opinions, in speaking of his so-called ^^ obscurity, ^^ cscnbes it to 
^^the nevej'-f ailing assumption that God is really 7fioving, teaching 
and acting ; and that the writer^ s business is not so much to state 
something for the reader's benefit, as to apprehefid what God is 
saying or doing. " The Spectator says — ^^JFezv of those of our own 
generation zvhose names will live in English history or literature 
have exerted so profound and so permanent an infiuence as Mr. 
Maurice.'''' 

THE PATRIARCHS AND LAWGIVERS OF THE 
OLD TESTAMENT. Third and Cheaper Edition. Crown 
8vo. 5J". 

The Nineteen Discourses contained iti this volume zvere preached in the 
chapel of Lincoln^ s Inn during the year 1S51. The texts are 
taken from the books of Genes^is^ Exodus, Kumbei's, Deuteronomy, 
Joshua, fudges, and Safuuel, and involve some of the most in- 
teresting biblical topics discussed in recent times. 

THE PROPHETS AND KINGS OF THE OLD TES- 
TAMENT. Third Edition, with new Preface. Crown 8vo. 
los. 6d. 

The previous ivork brings ^dozvn Old Testament history to the time oj 
Samuel. The Sermons contained in the present volume — tiventy 
srcen in member, coming dozen to the time of Ezckicl — though they 



32 ' THEOLOGICAL BOOKS. 

Maurice (F. D.) — contimud. 

commence at that point are distinct in their subject and treatment. 
Mr. Maurice^ in the spirit which animated the compilers of the 
Church Lessons^ has in these Sermons regarded the Prophets 7?iore 
as preachers of righteousness than as mere predictors — an aspect 
of their lives 7uhich, he thinks^ has been greatly overlooked in our 
day, and than which, there is none we have more need to con- 
tetnplate. He has found that the Old Testament Prophets, taken 
in their simple natural sense, clear up many of the difficulties 
which beset us in the daily zvork of life ; make thjp past intelligible, 
the present endurable, and the future 7'eal and hopeful. 

THE GOSPEL OF THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN. 
A Series of Lectures on the Gospel of St. Luke. Crown 8vo. (^s. 

Mr. Maurice, in his Preface to these Twenty-eight Lectures, says, 
— ''^ In these Lectures I have e^ideavoured to ascertain zuhat is told 
us respect i7tg the life of jfesus by one of those Evangelists who p'o- 
claim Him to be the Christ, who says that He did come from a 
Father, that He did baptize with the Holy Spirit, that He did rise 
f7'om the dead. I have chosen the one who is most directly co?i- 
nected with the later history of the Church, who was not a)t Apostle, 
who professedly w?'ote for the tise of a 7nan already i7istructed in 
the faith of the Apostles. I have followed the course of the writer's 
narrative, not changing it under a7iy p'etext. I have adhered to 
his phraseology, strivi7ig to avoid the subsiitutio7t of a7iy other for 
his.'' 

THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN. A Series of Discourses. 
Third and Cheaper Edition. Crown 8vo. 6s. 

These Discourses, twe7ity-eight in 7tu77iber, are of a nature si7nilar 
to those on the Gospel of St. Luke, and will be found to render 
valuable assista7ice to a7iy 07ie anxious to U7tderstand the Gospel of 
the beloved disciple, so diffe7'ent in 77mny respects from those of the 
other three Eva7zgelists. Appe7ided are elruen notes illustrating 
various points which occur throughout the discou7'ses. The Literary- 
Churchman thus speaks of this volu77ie: — ^'Thorough ho7iesiy, 
revere7icey and deep thought pe7'vade the work, which is every way 



THEOLOGICAL BOOKS, 33 

Maurice (F. D.) — continued. 

solid and philosopJiicaly as well as theological^ and aboii7iding with 
suggestions which the patient student may di'a^v out more at length 
for hi?nself.^^ 

THE EPISTLES OF ST. JOHN. A Series of Lectures 
on Christian Ethics. Second and Cheaper Edition. Cr. 8vo. 6^-. 

These Lectures 0)1 Christian Ethics were delivered to the students of 
the Working Men^s College^ Great Orniond Street, Londoti, on 
a sej-ies of Sunday viornings. There are twenty Lectures in all, 
foinided on various texts taken from the Epistles of St. jfohn, which 
abound in passages bearing directly on the conduct of life, the duty 
of men to God and to each other. It will be found that a very 
coniplete systet?i of practical morality is developed in this volume, 
in which the most important points in Ethics are set foHh in an 
unconventional and interesting manner. Mr. Maurice believes 
that the question in which we ar^ most interested, the question which 
most affects our studies and oicr daily lives, is the question, zuhether 
tha-e is a foundation for humaii morality, or whether it is de- 
pendent upon the opiniojis and fashions of different ages and 
countries. This i??iportant question will be found amply and fairly 
discussed in this voluine, which the National Review calls ^^ Mr. 
Maurices most effective and instructive woi'k. He is peculiarly 
fitted by the constitution of his mind, to throiv light on St. John's 
7U7'itings.'" Appended is a note on ''^ Positivism and its Teacher.^'' 

EXPOSITORY SERMONS ON THE PRAYER-BOOK. 

The Prayer-book considered especially in reference to the Romish 

System. Second Edition. Fcap. 8vo. 5^. 6^/. 

After an Ijitroductoiy Sermon, Mr. Maurice goes aver the larwu^ 
parts of the Church Service, expotinds in eighteen Sermons, their 
intention and significance, and shews how appropriate they are as 
expressions of the deepest longings and wants of all classes of men. 

LECTURES ON THE APOCALYPSE, or Book of the 
Revelation of St. John the Divine. Crown 8vo. loj-. 6t/. 
These Twenty-three Lectures on what is generally regarded as the most 



34 THEOLOGICAL BOOKS, 

Maurice (F. D.) — conthmed. 

mysterious Book in the Bible, do 7iot defnand that extensive know- 
ledge of ancient or modern history ivhich it is 7iecessary to possess 
to be able to judge of most modern commentaries on Prophecy. 
Mr, Maurice, instead of trying to find far-fetched allusions to great 
historical events in the distant future, endeavours to discover the 
plain, literal, obvious meaiiing of the words of the writer, a?td 
shezvs that as a rule these refer to events contef:4poraneous with or 
immediately succeeding the tifne whtn the book was written. At 
the same time he shews the applicability of the contents of the 
book to the ci7xumstaitces of the present day and of all times. 
''^ Never, ''^ says the Nonconformist, ^^ has Mr. Maurice been more 
reve7'ent, more careful for the letter of the Scripture, more discer fl- 
ing of the purpose of the Spirit, or more sober and practical in his 
teaching, than in this volume on the Apocalypse. " 

WHAT IS REVELATION? A Series of Sermons on the 

Epiphany; to which are adcled, Letters to a Theological Student 

on the Bampton Lectures of Mr. Mansel. Crown 8vo. \os. 6d. 

Both Sermons and Lettei's were called forth by the doctrine ??iain- 

tained by Air. Mansel in his Bavipton Lectures, that Revelation 

cannot be a direct Manifestation of the- Infinite Nature of God. 

Mr. Maurice maintains the oJ>posite doctrine, and in his Sermons 

explains why, in spite of the high authorities on the other side, 

he must still assert the priticiple which he discoz'ers in the Services 

of the Church and throughoiit the Bible. In the Letters to a 

Student of Theology, he has followed out all Mr. ManseVs 

Statements and Arguments step by step. The Nonconformist says, 

' ' There will befotmd ample materials to stimulate Christian faith 

and earnestness, to quicken and give tenderness to charity, and to 

vivify conceptions of the ^things not seen which are eternal.''^'' 

SEQUEL TO THE INQUIRY, "WHAT IS REVELA- 
TION?" Letters in Reply to Mr. Hansel's Examination of 
" Strictures on the Bampton Lectures." Crown 8vo. 6j. 
This, as the title indicates, was called forth by Air. MajiseVs Ex- 
amination of Mr. Maurice's Strictures on his doct7'ine of the 
Infinite. * 



THEOLOGICAL BOOKS, 35 

Maurice (F. D.) — contmtied. 

THEOLOGICAL ESSAYS. Third Edition. Crown 8vo. 

I Of. 6d. 

*^ The book,^^ says Mr. Maurice, ^^ expresses thoughts which have 
been zvorking in 7ny mind for years ; the method of it has not been 
adopted carelessly; men the composition has undergone freqtient 
7'ez'ision. " There are seventeen Essays in all, and although meant 
pri?narily for Unitarians, to quote the woi'ds of the Clerical 
Journal, '* /'/ leaves untouched scarcely any topic ivhich is in agita- 
tion in the religious zvorld ; scarcely a moot point betiueen our 
various sects ; scarcely a plot of deb at cable ground betiueen Christ- 
ians and Infidels, between Romanists and Protestants, between 
Socinians and other Christians, between English Churchmen and 
Dissenters on both sides. Scarce is there a misgiving, a dif- 
ficulty, an aspiration stirring amongst us nozu, — nozu, .when men 
seem in earnest as hardly ever before about religion, and ask and 
demand satisfaction with a fearlessness which seems almost awful 
when one thinks what is at stake — which is not recognised and 
grappled with by Air. Maurice.''^ 

THE DOCTRINE OF SACRIFICE DEDUCED FROM 
THE SCRIPTURES. Crown 8vo. yj-. 6^. 

Throughout the AHneteen Sernions contained in this volume, Mr. 
Maurice expounds the ideas which he has formed of the Doctrine 
of Sacrifice, as it is set foj'th in various parts of the Bible. ** The 
habitual tone," says the Christian Spectator, *'/> that of great 
seriousness and calm, — a seriousness which makes an impression of 
its own, and a serenity which is only broken by some overpozuering 
feeling forcing itself into expression, and ?naki?ig itself hea7'd in 
7?iost meaning and stirring words. '^^ 

THE RELIGIONS OF THE WORLD, AND THEIR 
RELATIONS TO CHRISTIANITY. Fourth Edition. Fcap. 
8vo. 5^-. 

These Eight Boyle Lectures are divided into two parts, of four 
Lectures each. In the first part Mr. Maurice examines the great 
Religious systems which present themselves in the history of the 



36 THEOLOGICAL BOOKS. 

Maurice (F. D.) — continued. 

worlds with the purpose of inquiring what is their main cha- 
racteristic principle. The second four Lectures are occupied ivith 
a discussion of the questions^ ^^ In what relation doe's Christianity 
stand to these different faiths ? If there be a faith which is 
meant for mankind^ is this the one, or must we look for another V 
In the Preface, the most i??iportant authorities on the various 
subjects discussed in the Lectures are referj'ed to^^o that the reader 
may pursue the subject further. 

ON THE LORD'S PRAYER. Fourth Edition. Fcap. 
8vo. 2.9. 6^. 

In these Nine Serinons the successive petitions of the Lord^s Prayer 
are taken up by Mr. Maurice, their significance expounded, and, 
as was usual with him, connected with the every-day lives, feelings, 
and aspirations of the men of the present time. They were de- 
livered in the momejitous year 1848, and frequent allusiojts are 
made and lessons drawn from the evejtts of that year. 

ON THE SABBATH DAY ; the Character of the Warrior, 
and on the Interpretation of History. Fcap. 8vo. 2s. 6d. 

This volume contains Three Sermons on the Sabbath-day, one of 
thein being in refere1^ce to the proposed opening of the Crystal 
Palace on Sunday — one on the ^^ Cha^'acter of the Waj'i'ior,^^ 
suggested by the Death of the Duke of Wellington ; the fifth being 
on ''''The Divine Interpretation of Histoiy,''^ delivered dtiring the 
Great Exhibition ^1851. In this last Mr. Maurice points out 
a few difficulties which, judging from his own expei'ience, he thinks 
likely to perplex students of history, explaining hoiu the Bible has 
anticipated and resolved them. 

THE GROUND AND OBJECT OF HOPE FOR 
MANKIND. Four Sermons preached before the University of 
Cambridge. Crown 8vo. 3^". 6d. 

In these Four Sermons Mr. Mawice views the subject in four 
aspects: — /. The, Hope of the Missionary. II. The Hope of the 
Patriot. III. The Hope of the Churchmafi. IV. The Hope of 



1 



THEOLOGICAL BOOKS, 37 

Maurice (F. D.) — continued. 

Man. The Spectator says^ ^^ It is i77ipossible to find anynvhere 
deeper teachi?ig than this ;^^ and the Nonconformist, ^^We thank 
him for the 7?iajily, noble, stirring words in these Sermons — words 
fitted to quicken thoughts , to awaken high aspiratioyt, to sti??iulate 
to lives ofi goodness.''"' 

THE LORD^S PRAYER, THE CREED, AND THE 

COMMANDMENTS. A Manual for Parents and Schoolmasters. 

To which is ^dded the Order of the Scriptures. i8mo. cloth 

limp. li". 

This book is not written for clergymen, as such, but for parents and 
teachers, who are often either prejudiced against the co?zteftts of the 
Catechism', or regard it peculiarly as the clergyman^ s book, but, 
at the same ti?ne, have a getteral notion that a habit of prayer 
ought to be cultivated, that there are some things which ought to 
be believed, and some things which ought to be done. It will be 
found to be peculiarly valuable at the present time, when the 
question of religious education is occupying so much attention. 

THE CLAIMS OF THE BIBLE AND OF SCIENCE. 

A Correspondence on some Questions respecting the Pentateuch. 
Crown 8vo. 45-. 6^/. 

This volume consists of a series of Fifteen Letters, the first and last 
addressed by a '' Lay mail'' to Mr. Maurice, the intervening thirteen 
written by Air. Maurice himself. 

DIALOGUES ON FAMILY WORSHIP. Crown 8vo. 6^-. 

* * The parties in these Dialogues, " says the Preface, * * are a Clergy- 
man who accepts the doctrines of the Church, and a Layman 
whose faith in them is nearly gone. The object of the Dialogues 
is not confutation, but the discovery of a ground on zvhich two 
Englishmen and two fathers may stand, and on which their 
country and their children may stand when their places ktiaiv 
them no tnore.^^ So??ie of the most iiyiportant doctrines of the 
Church are discussed, the whole series of dialogues tending to shew > 
that men of all shades of belief 7?iay look up to and worship God 
as their co7nmon and lovinsr Father. 



THEOLOGICAL BOOKS. 



Maurice (F. D.) — cojitiniied, 

THE COMMANDMENTS CONSIDERED AS IN- 
STRUMENTS OF NATIONAL REFORMATION. Crown 
8vo. 4i'. (id. 

This is a book of practical morality and divinity. It was to some 
extent occasioned by Dr. N'orman Macleod^s Speech on the Sabbath, 
and his views of the Commandments. The author endeavours to 
shew that the Co?7i77ia7idments ai'e 7zow, a7id ever have bee7t, the 
g7'eat protesters against P7'esbyte7'al a7id P7'elatical assimiptions, 
and that if we do not 7^eceive the77i as Co77i77iand77ients of the Lo7'd 
God spoken to Israel, and spoken to eve7y people under heaven 
7tow, we lose the greatest wit7zesses we possess for 7iatio7tal 77107'ality 
and civil f7'eedo77i. 

MORAL AND METAPHYSICAL PHILOSOPHY. Vol. 

I. Ancient Philosophy from the First to the Thirteenth Centuries. 

Vol. II. Fourteenth Century and the French Revolution, with a 

Glimpse into the Nineteenth Century. Two Vols. 8vo. 25 j". 

This is a7t edition i7i tivo volu7nes of P7'ofessor Mau7'ice's Histo7y of 
Philosophy fi'om the earliest period to the present time. It was 
for77ie)'ly issued in a nu77iber of sepa7'aie volu7nes, a7id it is believed 
that all ad77iirers of the autho7' a7id all students of philosophy will 
welcof7ze this co77ipact editio7t. hi a long introductioyi to this edition, 
in the for77i of a dialogue, Professor Mau7'ic€ justifies his ow7i 
views, and touches tcpon so77ie of the 77iost i77ipo7'ta7it topics of the 
time. 

SOCIAL MORALITY. Twenty-one Lectures delivered in 
the University of Cambridge. New and Cheaper Edition. Cr. 
8vo. \os. 6d. 

In this sei'ies of Lectures, P7'ofessor Mau7'ice co7iside7's, histo7'ically a77d 
C7'itically, Social AIo7'ality in its three 7nai7i aspects: — /. ^^ The 
Relations which spring from the Fa77iily — Do77iestic Morality. " 
//. ^''Relations which subsist a77io7ig the va7'ious constituents of a 
Nation — Natio7tal Morality.'^'' III. ^^ As 4t conce7'7ts Unive7'sal 
Hu77ianity — Universal Morality.''^ Appended to each se7'ies is a 
chapter on *' Worship:'''' first, ^^ Fa77iily Worship j^ second, 



THEOLOGICAL BOOKS, 39 

Maurice (F. D.) — co?itimied. 

''National Worship;'' third, ''Universal Worship:' "Whilst 
reading it roe are charmed by the freedom from exclusiveness and 
prejudice^ the large charity, the loftiness of thought, the eagerness 
to recognise and appreciate whatever there is of real worth extant 
in the world, which animates it f'om one end to the other. We 
gain new thoughts and new ways of vieiving things, even more, 
perhaps, from being brought for a time under tJie influeiue of so 
noble and spiritual a mindy — Athen?eum. 

THE CONSCIENCE : Lectures on Casuistry, delivered in 
the University of Cambridge. Second and Cheaper Edition. 
Crown 8vo. ^s. 

In this series of 7tine Lectures, Professor Maurice, endeavours to 
settle zuhat is meant by the ward " Consciejtce,'' and discusses the 
most imp07'tant questions immediately connected with the subject. 
Taking "Casuistry"''' in its old sense as being the " study of cases 
of Conscience,'' he endeavours to show in what way it may be 
brought to bear at the present day upon the acts and thoughts of 
our ordinary existence. He shozus that Conscience asks for laws, 
not rules ; for freedom, not chains ; for education, 7iot suppres- 
sion. He has abstained from the use of philosophical terins, and 
has touched on philosophical systems only when he fancied "they 
were interfiling with the rights and duties of wayfara's. " The 
Saturday Review says: " We rise from the perusal of these lectui'es 
with a detestation of all that is selfish and jtiean, and with a living 
impression that there is such a thing as goodness after all. " 

LECTURES ON THE ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY 
OF THE FIRST AND SECOND CENTURIES. 8vo. \os, 6d. 
The work contains a series of graphic sketches a }id vivid portraits, 
bringing forcibly befiore the reader the lifie ofithe early Church in all 
its main aspects, hi the first chapter on ' ' Theyewish Calling," besides 
expounding his idea of the true 7tature of a " Church,'^ the author 
gives a brief sketch of the position and economy ofithe yews ; while 
in the second he points out their relation to "the other N'ations." 
Chapter Third contains a succint account ofi the various ycivish 



40 THEOLOGICAL BOOKS, 

Maurice (F. D.) — continued. 

Sects ^ while in Chapter Fourth are briefly set forth Mr. Maurice^ s 
ideas of the character of Christ and the nature of His mission^ and 
a sketch of events is giveft up to the Day of Pentecost. The re- 
maining Chapters^ extefzding from the Apostles' pei'sonal Ministry 
to the end of the Second Centtiry, contain sketches of the character 
aitd work of all the prominent men in any way connected with the 
Early Church, accounts of the origin and nat-we of the various 
doctrines orthordox aitd heretical which had their birth during the 
period, as zvell as of the planting and early history of the Chief 
Churches in Asia, Africa and Europe. 

LEARNING AND WORKING. Six Lectures delivered 
in Willis's Rooms, London, in June and July, 1854. — THE 
RELIGION OF ROME, and its Influence on Modern Civilisa- 
tion. Four Lectures delivered in the Philosophical Institution of 
Edinburgh, in December, 1854. Crown 8vo. 5^. 

In the Dedicatioit and Preface to this vohuite, Professor Mattrice 
shows that these two sets of Lectures have many points of connec- 
tioji. In the first series of Lectures the author endeavours to ex- 
plain to such an audience as was likely to meet in Willis's Rooms ^ 
the scope and aims of the course of education established at the 
then recently founded Working Me?i^s College, and at the same 
time expounds his notions of education in genei^al, the pivot of his 
system being the truth that Learning and Working are not inco?n- 
patible. The title to the second series is a sufficient index to their 
nature. 

Moorhouse. — Works by James MooiS-HOUSE, M.A., Vicar 
of Paddington ; — 

SOME MODERN DIFFICULTIES RESPECTING the 
FACTS OF NATURE AND REVELATION. Fcap. 8vo. 
2s. 6d. 

The first of these Four Discourses is a systematic reply to the Essay 
of the Rev. Baden Powell on Christian Evidences in ^^ Essays and 
Reviews.'''' The fourth Sermon, on ** The Resurrection,^^ is in 



THEOLOGICAL BOOKS, 41 



Moorhouse (J.) — cont'mned, 

SiVJie 7fieasu7'e coviplementary to this, and the two together are 
intended to furnish a tolerably complete view of modern objections 
to Revelation. In the second and third Ser772ons, on the " Teinpta- 
tion^^ and ^' Passion,^'' the author has endeavoured ^* to exhibit the 
power and wonder of those great facts within the spii'itual sphere, 
which 7nodern theorists have especially sought to discredit y The 
British Quarterly says of them, — ''''The tone of the discussion is 
able, and throughout conservative of Scriptural truth.'''' 

JACOB. Three Sermons preached before the University of 
Cambridge in Lent 1870. Extra fcap. 8vo. y. 6d. 

In these Three Ser77ions the author endeavours to indicate the course 
of that Divine training by zvhich the patriarch yacob was converted 
fro77i a deceitful and unscrupulous into a pious a7id self-denying 
man. In the first Se7'77ion is co7tsidered *' The Human Sttbject,'''' 
or the nature to be trained ; in the second *' The Divine lower ^^'' 
the power by which that training zvas effected ; and i7t the third 
" The G7'eat Cha7igey or the course and f 01-771 of the traini7ig. 

THE HULSEAN LECTURES FOR 1865. Cr. 8vo. 5^-. 

The following are the subjects of the Four Htdsean Lectu7'es i7t this 
volume: — /. ^^Beai'ing of Present Co7ttroversies on the Docti'ine of 
the Incarftation."*^ II. ''^ How far the Hypothesis of a real Limit- 
ation in our Saviour'' s Human K7towledge is co7isistent with the 
Doct7'ine of His Divinity. " ///. ' ' The Sc7'iptural Evidence of 
our Saviour'' s Sinless7tess.''^ IV. ^^What Ki7td and Degree of 
Human Igiiorance we7'e left possible to otir Lord Jesus Ch7'ist by 
the fact of His Hiwian Sinlessness.'''' ^Ena 77iore valuable works 
have come into our hands for many years . . . a 7nost f'uitful and 
zvelco77ie vohwie.^'' — Church Review. 

O'Brien.— AN ATTEMPT TO EXPLAIN and ESTAB- 
LISH THE DOCTRINE OF JUSTIFICATION by FAITH 
ONLY. By James Thomas O'Brien, D.D., Bishop of Ossory. 
Third Edition. 8vo. \2s. 
This ivork consists of l^en Sermons. The first Jour treat of the nature 



42 THEOLOGICAL BOOKS, 

and mutual relations of Faith and yustification ; the fifth attd 
sixth examine the corruptions of the doctrine of Jtistification by Faith 
only, and the ohjectio7is which have been urged against it. The four 
concluding sermons deal with the moral effects of Faith. Various 
Notes are added explanatory of the Author'' s reasoning. 

Palgrave. — HYMNS. By Francis Turner Palgrave. 
Third Edition, enlarged. i8mo. \s. 6d. 

This is a collection of twenty original Hymns, which the Literaiy 
Churchman speaks of as ^^so choice, so perfect, and so refined, — 
so tender in feeling, and so scholarly in exp7^essio7Z." 

Palmer.— THE BOOK OF PRAISE: From the Best 
Enghsh Hymn Writers. Selected and arranged by Lord Selborne. 
With Vignette by W^oolner. i8mo. 4^-. 6d. 

The present is an attempt to present, under a convenient arrangernent, 
a collection of such examples of a copious and interesting branch of 
popular literature, as, after several year s^ study of the subject, have 
seemed to the Editor 7?iost worthy of being separated from the mass 
to which they belong. It has been the Editor's desire and aim to 
adhere strictly, in all cases in which it could be ascertained, to the 
genuine uncorrupted text of the authors themselves. The names of 
the authors and date of composition of the hymns, when known, 
are affixed, while notes are added to the volume, giving further 
details. The Hyrnns are arranged according to subjects, *' There 
is not room for tzvo opinions as to the value of the ''Book of Praise. 
— Guardian. * ''Approaches as nearly as one can conceive to per- 
fection.''^ — Nonconformist. 

BOOK OF PRAISE HYMNAL. See end of this Catalogue. 

Paul of Tarsus. An Inquiry into the Times and the 
Gospel of the Apostle of the Gentiles. By a Graduate. 8vo. 
10s. 6d. 

The Author of this work has attempted, out of the mateo'ials which 
were at his disposal, to construct for hirnself a sketch of the time in 
which St. Paul lived, of the religious systems with which he was 
brought in contact, of the doctrine which he taught, and of the 



THEOLOGICAL BOOKS, 43 

ivork which he ultimately achieved. ** Turn where we will 
throughout the volume, we find the best fruit of patient inquiry, 
sound scholarship, logical argument, and fairness of conclusion. 
No thoughtful reader will risefro??i its perusal without a real and 
lasting profit to hit?iself, and a sense of permanent addition to the 
cause oftruthy — Standard. 

Prescott — THE THREEFOLD CORD. Sermons preached 
before the University of Cambridge. By J. E. Prescott, B.D. 
Fcap. 8vo. 3J'. 6<^. 

The title of this vohime is derived from the stdyjects of the first three 
of these Sermons — Love, Hope, Faith. Their full titles are : — 
/. ^^ Christ the Bj'inger of Peace — Love.^'' I I. ^''Christ the Reno- 
vator— Hope.'' III. ''Christ the Light— Faith.'' The fourth, 
an Assize Sermo7t, is on * * The Divinity of Justice. " The Sejynons 
are an attejupt to shezv that Christian theology is sufficient for the 
wants of the present day. 

Procter.— A HISTORY OF THE BOOK OF COMMON 
PRAYER: With a Rationale of its Offices. By Francis 
Procter, M.A. Tenth Edition, revised and enlarged. Crown 
8vo. \os. 6d. 

The fact that in fifteen years nine editions of this volume have been 
called for, shews that such a work was wanted, and that to a large 
extent Mr. Procter's book has supplied the want. ''In the course 
of the last thirty years," the author says, "the whole subject has 
been investigated by divines of great learning, and it was mainly with 
a view of epitomizing their extensive publications, and cori'ecting 
by their help sundry traditional errors or misconceptions, that the 
present vohune was put together." The Second Part is occupied 
with an account of "The Sources and Rationale of the Offices." 
The Athenaeum says: — "The origin of eveiy part of the Prayer- 
book has been diligently investigated, — and there are few questions 
or facts connected with it which are not either sufficiently explained, 
or so referred to, that persons interested may work out the truth for 
themselves " 



44 THEOLOGICAL BOOKS, 

Procter and Maclear.— AN ELEMENTARY INTRO- 
DUCTION TO THE BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER. 
Fourth Edition, Re-arranged and Supplemented by an Explanation 
of the Morning and Evening Prayer and the Litany. By F. 
Procter, M.A. and G. F. Maclear, D.D. i8mo. 2s. 6d. 
This book has the same object . and follows the same plan as the 
Manuals already noticed under Mr, Maclear'' s name. Each book 
is subdivided into chapters and sections. In S^ook I. is given a 
detailed History of the Book of Common Prayer down to the 
Attempted Rezdsion in the Reign of William HI. Book II. , con- 
sisting of four Parts ^ treats in order the various parts of the 
Prayer Book. Valuable Notes ^ ety7nological, historical^ and critical, 
are given throughout the book, while the Appendix contains several 
articles of much interest and impo7'ta7tce. Appended is a General 
Index and an Index of Words explained in the Notes. The 
Literary Churchman characterizes it as ^^ by far the cotnpletest 
and most satisfactory book of its kind we know. We wish it 
were in the hands of every schoolboy and every schoolmaster' in the 
dom.^^ 



Psalms of David CHRONOLOGICALLY ARRANGED. 

An Amended Version, with Historical .Introductions and Ex- 
planatory Notes. By Four Friends. Second and Cheaper 
Edition, much enlarged. Crown 8vo. %s. 6d. 
One of the chief designs of the Editors, in preparing this volume, 
was to restore the Psalter as far as possible to the order in which 
the Psalms were written. They give the division of each Psalm 
into strophes, and of each strophe into the lines zvhich composed it, 
and a??iend the errors of translation. In accomplishing this work 
they have mainly followed the guidance of Professor Henry Ewald. 
A Supplernent contains the chief specimens of Hebrew Lyric poetry 
not included in the Book of Psalms. The ^Spectator calls it ^^Ofte 
of the most instructive and vahiable books that have been published 
for many years. " 

Golden Treasury Psalter. — The Student's Edition. 

Being an Edition with briefer Notes of the above. i8mo. 3^-. 6^. 
This volu?7ie will be found to meet the requirefuents of those who wish 



THEOLOGICAL BOOKS. 45 

for a smaller edition of the larger work, at a lower price for family 
itse, and for the use of younger pupils in Public Schools. The 
short notes which are appended to the volume will, it is looped, 
suffice to make the meaning intelligible throughout. The ai?n of 
this edition is simply to put the reader as far as possible in pos- 
session of the plain meanijig of the tvriter. '^ It is a geni^'^^ the 
Nonconformist says. 

Ramsay.— THE CATECHISER'S MANUAL; or, the 
Church Catechism Illustrated and Explained, for the Use of 
Clergymen, Schoolmasters, and Teachers. By Arthur Ramsay, 
M.A. Second Edition. i8mo. \s. 6d. 

This Manual, which is in the foriii of question and answer, is in- 
tended to afford full assistance both to learners and teacJiers, to 
candidates for Confirmation as well as to clergymen, in the 
understanding of the Church Catechism, and of all the 7?iatters 
referred to therein. 

Rays of Sunlight for Dark Days. A Book of Selec- 
tions for the Suffering. With a Preface by C. J. Vaughan, D.D. 
i8mo. Fifth Edition. 3^". dd. Also in morocco, old style. 
Dr. Vaughan says in the Preface, after speaking of the general run 
of Books of Co77ifort for Alourfters, ^^ It is because I think that 
the little volu7Jie now offered to the Christian sufferer is one of 
greater wisdom and of deeper experience, that I have readily con- 
sented to the request that I would introduce it by a few words of 
Preface.^^ The book consists of a series of veiy brief extracts f'om 
a great variety of authors, in prose and poetry, suited to the many 
moods of a mourning or sufferi^ig mind. ''^Mostly gems of the first 
water. " — Clerical Journal. 

Reynolds.— NOTES OF THE CHRISTIAN LIFE. A 
Selection of Sermons by Henry Robert Reynolds, B.A., 
President of Cheshunt College, and Fellow of University College, 
London. Crown 8vo. 7^. (yd. 

This work may be taken as representatri'e of the mode of thought and 
feeling which is most popular a?nongst the freer and more cultivated 



46 THEOLOGICAL BOOKS, 

Nonconfonnists. ** The reader thj'oughout,^^ says the Patriot, 
^^ feels himself 171 the grasp of an earnest and careful thinker." 
^^It is longy" says the Nonconformist, *'^ since we have met with 
any published sennons better calculated than these to stimulate 
dez'out thought^ and to bring home to tJie soul the reality of a 
spiritual life.'''' 

Roberts.— DISCUSSIONS ON THE GOSPELS. By the 
Rev. Alexander Roberts, D.D. Second Edition, revised and 
enlarged. Svo. \^s. 

This volume is divided into two parts. Part I. '"''On the La/igita^c 
employed by our Lord and His Disciples y''' in which the author 
eiuieavoui's to prove that Greek was the language usually employed 
by Christ Himself in opposition to the common belief that Our 
Lord spoke Aramcean. Pai-t LL. is occupied with a discussion 
^^ On the Original Language of St, Matthew's Gospel,'' atid on 
''^ The Origin and Authenticity of the Gospels." '■^ The author 
brings the valuable qualifications of learning, temper, and an 
independent judgtnettt. " — Daily News. 

Robertson.— PASTORAL COUNSELS. Being Chapters 
on Practical and Devotional Subjects. By tlie late John Robert- 
son, D.D. Third Edition, with a Preface by the Author of 
*' The Recreations of a Countiy Parson." Extra fcap. Svo. 6s. 
These Sermons are tJie free uttei'ances of a strong and independent 
thinker. He does not depart from t/ie essential doctrines of his 
Church, but he expouruls them in a spirit of the widest charity, and 
always having most promhiently in vieiu t/ie requirements of prac- 
tical life. *' The sermons are admirable specimens of a practical^ 
earnest, and instructive style of pulpit teaehing. '' — Nonconformist. 

RowselL— MAN'S LABOUR AND GODS HARVEST. 

Sermons preached before the University of Cambridge in Lent, 

1 86 1. Fcap. Svo. 3J-. 

This volume contains Five Sermons, the general drift of 7vhich is 
indicated by tlie title. ' ' We strongly recommend this little volume 
to young men, a?id especially to those who are contemplating work- 



THEOLOGICAL BOOKS. 47 

ing for Cki'ist in Holy Orders y — Literary Churchman. ''*■ Mr. 
RoiuselVs Sermons jfiust, lue feel sure, have touched the heart of 
many a Cajnbridge Undergraduate, and are deserving of a wide 
general circulation.'*^ — The Ecclesiastic. 

Salmon.— THE REIGN OF LAW, and other Sermons, 
preached in the Chapel of Trinity College, Dublin. By the Rev. 
George Salmon, D.D., Regius Professor of Divinity in the 
University of Dublin. Crown 8vo. 65. 

Sanday.— THE AUTHORSHIP AND HISTORICAL 
CHARACTER OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL, considered in 
reference to the Contents of the Gospel itself. A Critical Essay. 
By William Sanday, M.A., Fellow of Trinity College, Oxford. 
Cro^\Tl 8vo. Zs. 6d. 

The object of this Essay is critical and nothing ?nore. The Author 
attempts to apply faithfully a Jid persistently to the contents of the 
much disputed fourth Gospel that scientific method which has been 
so successful in other direct iojis. ^^ The facts of religion, ^^ the 
Author believes, *'(i. e. the documents, the history of religious 
bodies, c^r. ) are as much facts as the lie of a coal-bed or the forma- 
tio7i of a coral-reef^"* ** The Essay is not only most valuable in 
itself, but full of promise for the ftiture.'*'' — Canon Westcott in the 
Academy. 

Sergeant.— SERMONS. By the Rev. E. W. Sergeant, 
M.A., Balliol College, Oxford; Assistant Master at Westminster' 
College. Fcap. 8vo. 2.s. 6d. 

This volume contains Nine Sermons on a variety of topics, preached 
by the author at various times and to various classes of hearers. 
The First Sermon is on Free Inquiry. 

Smith.— PROPHECY A PREPARATION FOR CHRIST. 
Eight Lectures preached before the University of Oxford, being the 
Bampton Lectures for 1869. By R. Payne Smith, D.D., Dean 
of Canterbury. Second and Cheaper Edition. Crown 8vo. 6j. 
The atithor s object in these Lectures is to shew that th^re exists in the 



48 THEOLOGICAL BOOKS. 

Old Testament an elemerit, which no C7'iticism on naturalistic 
principles can either account for or explain azvay: that element is 
Prophecy. The author endeavours to prove that its force does not 
consist merely in its predictions. The Bible describes man^s first 
estate of innocency^ his fall ^ and the promise given by God of his 
restoration. Virtually the promise meant that God would give 
7?ian a true religion; and the author asserts that Christianity is 
the sole religion on earth that fulfils the conditions necessary to 
constitute a true religion. God has pledged Nis oivn attributes 
in its behalf ; this pledge He has given in miracle and prophecy. 
The author endeavours to shew the reality of that po7'tion of the 
proof founded on prophecy. * ' These Lectw^es overflow with solid 
learning. " — Record. 

Smith. — CHRISTIAN FAITH. Sermons preached before 

the University of Cambridge. By W. Saumarez Smith, M.A., 

Principal of St. Aidan's College, Birkenhead. Fcap. 8vo. 3J-. 6^. 

The first two sermons in this volume have special reference to the 

Person of Christ ; the next two are concerned with the inner life 

of Christians ; and the last speaks of the outward developmeitt of 

Christian faith. ^''Appropriate and earnest sermons^ suited to the 

practical exhortation of an educated coftgregation.'''' — Guardian. 

Stanley. — Works by the Very Rev. A. P. Stanley, D.D., 
Dean of Westminster. 
THE ATHANASIAN CREED, with a Preface on the 
General Recommendations of the Ritual Commission. Cr. 
8vo. 2S. 

The object of the work is not so much to urge the o7?iission or change 
of the Athanasian Ci^eed^ as to shew that such a relaxation ought 
to -give offence to no reasonable or religious mind. With this 
view, the Dean of Westminster discusses in succession — (i) the 
Authorship of the Creed, (2) its Internal Characteristics, (3) the 
Peculiarities of its Use in the Church of England, (4) its Ad- 
vantages and Disadvantages, (5) its various Interpretations, and 
(6) the Judgment passed upon it by the Ritual Com77iission. In 
conclusion, Dr. Stanley maintains that the use of the Athanasian 



THEOLOGICAL BOOKS. 49 

Stanley (Dean) — continued, 

Cf'ecd should no longer be made compulsory. '"''Dr. Stanley puts 
with admirable force the objections which may be made to the Creed ; 
equally admirable, we think, in his statement of its advantages.''^ — 
Spectator. 

THE NATIONAL THANKSGIVING. Sermons preached 
in Westminster Abbey. vSecond Edition. Crown 8vo. 2s. 6d. 

These Sermons are (i) ^^ Death and Life, ^"^ preached Dece?nber lo, 
1871 ; (2) ''The Tru7?ipet of Fatmos,'' December 17, 1871 ; 
(3) *' The Day of Thanksgiving,'' March 3, 1872. It is hoped 
that these Sermons i?iay recall, in some degree, the se^'ious reflections 
C07i7iected zuith the P7'ince of Wales's illness, which, if the station is 
true to itself, ought not to pei'ish with the moment. The proceeds of 
the publication will be devoted to the Fund for the Restoration of 
St. Faults Cathedral. '' In point of fervour and polish by far the 
best specimens in print ofDea?i Stanley's eloquent style. " — Standard. 

Sunday Library. See end of this Catalogue. 

Swainson. — Works by C. A. Swainson, D.D., Canon of 
Chichester : — 

THE CREEDS OF THE CHURCH IN THEIR RE- 
LATIONS TO HOLY SCRIPTURE and the CONSCIENCE 
OF THE CHRISTIAN. 8vo. cloth. 9^-. 

The Lectures which compose this volume discuss, amongst others, the 
following subjects : ''Faith in God," " Exercise of our Reason," 
"Origin and Authority of Creeds," a7td " Frivate judgment, Us 
use and exe7'cise." " T'eati/tg of abstruse poi7its of Scripture, he 
applies the77i so forcibly to Ch7'istian duty and practice as to prove 
e77ii7ie7ttly se7'viceable to the Church." — ^John Bull. 

THE AUTHORITY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT, 
and other LECTURES, delivered before the University of Cam- 
bridge. 8vo. cloth. \2s. 

The first series of Lectures i7i this work is 07t " The IVm'ds spoken by 

4 



so THEOLOGICAL BOOKS, 



the Apostles of ycsus,^'' " The Inspiration of God^s Servants ^^^ 
** The Human Character of the Inspired Writers" and ** The 
Divifie Character of the Word written.'*^ The second embraces 
Lectures on '"'' Sin as Imperfection^''^ ^'' Sin as Self-will ," ^^What- 
soever is not of Faith is Siji," " Christ the Saviour ," aji-d ** The 
Blood of the New Covenant." The third is on ^^ Christians One 
Body in Christ" ** The One Body the Spouse of Christ" '* Christ's 
Prayer for Unity" '* Our Reconciliation should be manifested in 
conifnon Worship" and ^^ A?}ibassado7's for Christ." ^^ All the 
grave and awful questions associated with human sinfid7iess a^id 
tlie Divine plan of redemption are discussed with minute and 
painstaking care^ and in the Appe?idix all the passages of Scripture 
referring to them are 7narshalled and critically revietued." — 
Wesleyan Times. 

Taylor.— THE RESTORATION OF BELIEF. New and 
Revised Edition. By Isaac Taylor, Esq. Crown 8vo. 2>s. 6d. 
The earlier chaptei's are occupied with an examination of the pi'imitive 
histo7y of the Ch7'istia7i Religio7t, and its I'elation to the Ro77ian 
gover7ime7it ; a7id here^ as well as i7i the re7nai7ider of the work, the 
author shews the beari7tg of that history 07t so77ie of the difficult and 
inter esti7ig questio7is which have 7'ecently been clai77iing the atie7itio7i 
of all ea7'7iest 77ien. The book will befou7id to co7itai7i a clear and 
full state7?ient of the case as it at p7'ese7it sta7ids in behalf of Ch7'ist- 
ianity. The last chapter of this Neiu Editio7i treats of. ^^ The 
Present Position of the Argu77ie7it C07ice7'ni7ig Christia7iity" with 
special refere7ue to M. Rena7i^s Vie de Jesus. The Journal of 
Sacred Literature says, — "77/^ current of thought which 7'uns 
through this book is calni a7td clear, its to7ie is ea7-nest, its 77ian7ier 
courteous. The author has carefully studied the successive p7'oble7ns 
which he so ably handles. " 

Temple.— SERMONS PREACHED IN THE CHAPEL 
of RUGBY SCHOOL. ByF. Temple, D.D., Bishop of Exeter. 
New and Cheaper Edition. Extra fcap. 8vo. 4^". 6d. 

This volume contai7is Thii'ty-five Ser77i07is on topics 77i07'e or less inti- 
mately connected with eveiy-day life. The following a7'e a few of 
the subjects discoursed upon: — ^^Love a7id Duty:" '^Co7Jii7ig to 



I 



THEOLOGICAL BOOKS. 51 



Temple (F., D.D.) — cont'umed. 

Christ;'' ''Great Men f' ''Faith f' "Doubts;'' "Scruples;' 
"Original Sin;" "Friendship;" "Helping Others ;" " The Dis- 
cipline of Temptation ;" "Strength a Duty f " Worldliness ;" 
"III Temper;" " The Burial of the Past." The Critic speaks of 
them thus : — * * IVe trust that the tender affectioitate spii'it of practical 
Christianity which runs through every page of the volume will have 
its due effect. . . . desiring to rouse the youthful hearers to a sense of 
duty, and to arm them agaittst the perils and dangers of the world 
against ivhich they are so soon to battle. " 

A SECOND SERIES OF SERMONS PREACHED IN 
THE CHAPEL OF RUGBY SCHOOL. Second Edition. 
Extra fcap. 8vo. 6^. 

This Second Series of Forty -two brief pointed, practical Sermons, on 
topics intimately co7tnected with the every-day life of young and old, 
will be acceptable to all who are acquainted with the First Series. 
The following are afezu of the subjects treated of : — "Disobedience," 
"Almsgiving," " The Unknown Guidance of God," "Apathy one 
of our Trials," "High Aims in Leaders," "Doing our Best," 
"The Use of Knozvledge," " Use of Obsei-vances," "Maiiha and 
Mary," "yohn the Baptist," "Severity befoi'e Mercy," "Even 
Mistakes Punished," "Morality and Religion," "Children," 
"Action the Test oj Spiritual Life," "Self Respect," "Too Late," 
"The Tercentenaiy." 

A THIRD SERIES OF SERMONS PREACHED IN 
RUGBY SCHOOL CHAPEL IN 1S67— 1869. Extra fcap. 
8vo. 6s. 

This third series of Bishop Temple's Rugby Sermons, cojitains thirtv- 
six brief discourses, characterized by "a penetrating and direct 
practicabiess, informed by a rare intuitive sympathy with boy- 
nature ; its keen perception of reality and earnestness, its equally 
keen sympathy with what is 71 obi est in sentiment and feelings." 
The volujue includes the " Good-bye" sermon preached on his 
leaving Rugby to enter on the office he now holds. 



52 THEOLOGICAL BOOKS, 

Thring. — Works by Rev. Edward Thring, M.A. 

SERMONS DELIVERED AT UPPINGHAM SCHOOL. 
Crown 8vo. ^s. 

In this volume are contained Forty-seven brief Sermons, all on 
subjects moi'e or less intimately connected with Public-school life. 
''''We desire very highly to commend these capital Sermons which 
t7'eat of a boy^s life and trials in a thoroughly practical way and 
with great simplicity and impressiveness. They desei've to be classed 
with the best of their kind^ — Literary Churchman. 

THOUGHTS ON LIFE-SCIENCE. New Edition, en- 
larged and revised. Crown 8vo. *]s. 6d. 

In this volume are discussed in a familiar manner some of the most 
interesting problems betiveen Science a7id Religion, Reason and 
Feeling. * ^Learning and Science,'''' says the Author, ' ^are clahning 
the right of building up and pulling down everything, especially 
the latter. It has sce??ied to me no iLseless task to look steadily at 
what has happened, to take stock as it were of m.an^ s gains , and to 
endeavour a^nidst new cii'ctimstances to ari'ive at some rational 
estimate of the bearings of things, so that the limits of what is pos- 
sible at all events ?nay be clearly mai-ked out for ordinary readers. 
.... This book is an eizdeavour to bring out sonie of the main 
facts of the world.'''' 

Tracts for Priests and People. By Various 
Writers. 

The First Series. Crown 8vo. Sj*. 
The Second Series. Crown Svo. %s. 
The whole Series of Fifteen Tracts may be had separately, price 

One Shilling each. 
A series of papers written after the excitement aroused by the publica- 
tion of " Essays and Reviews''' had somewhat abated, and designed, 
by the exposition of positive truth, to 7Jieet the religious difficulties of 
honest inquirers. Amongst the winters are Mr. Thomas Hughes, 
Professor Maurice, the Rev. y. Llewellyn Davies, and Mr. jf. M. 
Ludlow. 



THEOLOGICAL BOOKS, 53 



Trench. — Works by R. Chenevix Trench, D.D., Arch- 
bishop of Dublin. (For other Works by the same author, see 
Biographical, Belles Lettres, and Linguistic Cata- 
logues). 

Archbishop Trench is well hioimi as a writer who has the happy 
faculty of being able to take with discri?nination the results of the 
highest criticism and scholarship, and present them in such a shape 
as will be not only valuable to scholars, but interesting, intelligible, 
and of the greatest use eveii to the ordinary reader. It is generally 
acknowledged that fro) men have been more successful in bringing 
out the less obvious meanings of the New Testament, or done more 
for the popular yet scholarly exposition of the Bible generally. 

NOTES ON THE PARABLES OF OUR LORD. 

Eleventh Edition. . 8vo. \2s. 

This work has taken its place as a standard exposition and inteipr el- 
ation of Chrisfs Parables. The book is prefaced by an Intro- 
ductory Essay in four chapters: — /. On the definition of the 
Parable. II. On Teaching by Parables. III. On the Interpret- 
ation of the Parables. IV. On other Parables besides those in the 
Scriptures. The author then proceeds to take tip the Parables one 
by one, and by the aid of philology, history, antiquities, and the 
researches' of travellers, shews foi'th the significance, beazity, and 
applicability of each, concluding with what he deems its true moral 
interpretation. In the numerous Notes are many valuable references, 
illusti'ative quotations, critical and philological annotations, etc., 
and appended to the volume is a classified list of fifty-six 2uorks on 
the Parables. 

NOTES ON THE MIRACLES OF OUR LORD. 

Ninth Edition. 8vo. \2s. 

In the ''Preliminary Essay ^ to this work, all the momentous and 
interesting questions that have been raised in connection with 
Miracles, are discussed with C07isider able fulness, and the autho?^s 
usual candour and learning. The Essay consists of six chapters : 
— /. On the Names of Miracles, i. e. the Greek words by which 
they are designated in the Neiv Testament. II. The Miracles 



54 THEOLOGICAL BOOKS. 



Tre n ch — continued. 

and Nature — What is the difference between a Miracle and 
any event in the ordinary course of Nature! III. The 
Authority of Miracles — Is the Miracle to command absolute obe- 
dience ? IV. The Evangelical^ compa7'cd with the other cycles of 
Miracles, V. The Assaults on the Miracles — i. The Jewish. 
2. The Heatheii (Celsus etc.). 3. The Pantheistic (Spinosa etc.). 
4. The Sceptical (Hume). 5. The Miracles only relatively mi- 
raculous ( Schleiermacher). 6. The Rationalistic (Paulus). *]. 
The Historico- Critical ( Woolston, Strauss). V7. The Apologetic 
Worth of the Miracles. The author then treats the separate 
Miracles as he does the Parables. 

SYNONYMS OF THE NEW TESTAMENT. New 

Edition, enlarged. 8vo. cloth. \2s. 

The study of synojtyjns in any language is valuable as a discipline 
for training the mind to close and accurate habits of thought ; 
more especially is this the case in Greek — ' ' a language spoken by 
a people of the finest and subtlest intellect ; who saw distinctions 
where others saw none ; who divided out to different words what 
others often were co^itent to huddle confusedly under a common 
term. . . . Where is it so desirable that we should miss nothings 
that zve should lose no finer hitention of the writer, as in those 
words which are the vehicles of the very mind of God Himself V^ 
This work is recognised as a -valuable companion to every student 
of the New Testa?jient in the original. This, the Seventh Edition, 
has been carefully revised, and a considerable nu7nber of new 
synonyms added. Appended is an Index to the Synonyms, and 
an Index to many other zvords alluded to or explained th^'oughout 
the work. ^Heis," the Athenaeum says, " « guide in this depart- 
ment of knowledge to whom his readers may intrust themselves with 
confidence. His sober judgment and sound sense are barriers against 
the misleading influence of arbitrary hypotheses.^'' 

ON THE AUTHORIZED VERSION OF THE NEW 
TESTAMENT. Second Edition. 8vo. 7^. 

Archbishop Trench's familiarity with the New Testament makes 
him peculiarly fitted to estimate the value of the present translation. 



THFAnLOGICAL BOOKS. 



T r e n ch — contin ued. 

and to gh>e directions as to how a new one s/ttiiiu uc proceeded 
with. After some Introductory Remarks , in which the propriety 
of a rez'ision is briefly discussed^ the whole question of the merits 
of the present version is gone into in detail^ in elezen chapters. 
Appended is a chronological list of works bearing on the subject^ 
an Inddx of the principal Texts considered^ an Index of Greek 
Words, and an Index of other Words referred to throughout the 
book. 

STUDIES IX THE GOSPELS. Second Edition. Svo. 

I Of. 6d^. 

This book is published under the coniictivji that the assertion often 
models untrue, — ziz. tJiat the Gospels are in the main plain and 
easy, and that all the chief difficulties of tJu New Testament are 
to be found in the Epistles, These *'*' Studies,^'' ^ixteefi in number, 
are the fruit of a much larger scheme, atid each Study deals 
iinth some important episode mentioned in the Gospels, in a critical, 
philosophical, and practical manner. Many learned references 
and quotations are added to the Azotes. Among the subjects treated 
are: — The Temptation ; Christ and tJu Samaritan Woman; The 
Three Aspirants; The Transfiguration ; Zacckceus; The True 
Vine; The Penitent Malefactor ; Christ and the Two Disciples on 
the way to Emmaus. 

COMMENTARY ON THE EPISTLES to the SEVEN 

CHURCHES IN ASIA. Third Edition, reused. Svo. %s. 6d. 

The present work consists of an Introduction, being a commentary 

oti Rez: i. 4 — 20, a detailed examination of each of the Sez'en 

Epistles, in all its bearings, and an Excursus on the Historico- 

Prophetical Interpretation of the Epistles. 

THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT. An Exposition 
drawn from the writings of St Augustine, with an Essay on his 
merits as an Interpreter of Holy Scripture. Third Edition, en- 
larged. Svo. lOJ. 6d. 

The first half of the present work consists of a dissertation in eight 
chapters on ^^ Augustine as an Interpreter of Scripture,^* the titles 



56 THEOLOGICAL BOOKS. 



Trench — conti?iued. 

of the sez'cral chapta's being as follcnv : — /. Augiisfifi^s General 
Viezvs of Scripture and its Interpretation. II. The External 
Helps for the Interpretation of Scripture possessed by Augustine. 
HI. Augustine' s Friftciples and Canons of Inteipretation. IV. 
Augustine's Allegorical Interpretation of Scripture. V. Ilhistra- 
tions of Atigustine's Skill as an Interpreter of Scripture. VI. 
Augustine on yohn the Baptist and on St. Stephen. VII. Au- 
gustine on the Epistle to the Romans. VIII. Miscellaneous Ex- 
amples of Augustini s Interpretatio7i of Scripturei-l The latter half 
of the work consists of Atigustine's Exposition of the Sermon on 
the Mounts not hoivever a mere sei'ies of quotations from Augustine^ 
but a connected account of his sentiments on the various passages of 
that Ser?non, interspersed with criticisms by Archbishop Trench. 

SERMONS PREACHED in WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 
Second Edition. 8vo. \os. 6d. 

These Sermons embrace a wide variety of topics^ and are thoroughly 
practical, earnest, and evangelical, and simple in style. The 
following are a few of the subjects: — ^^Tercentenary Celebration 
of Queen Elizabeths Accession f^ ^''Conviction and C onv elusion f^ 
** The Incredulity of Thomas ;'''' *' The Angels' Hymn;^^ ''^Count- 
ing the Costf^ '"'' The Holy Trinity in Relation to our Prayers f 
'"''On the Death of Gena^al Havelockf ''''Christ Weeping over 
Jerusalem ; " * ' Walkittg zvith 'Ch rist in Wh ite. ' ' 

SHIPWRECKS OF FAITH. Three Sermons preached 
before the University of Cambridge in May, 1867. Fcap. 8vo. 
2s. 6d. 

These Sei'mons are especially addj-essed to young 7uen, The subjects 
are ''''Balaam,''^ ''''Saul,'''' and ''''Judas Iscariot,^'' three of the 
mournf idlest lives recorded in Scripture, ''''for the greatness of 
their vocatian, and their disastrous falling short of the sarne, 
for the tetter defeat of their lives, for the shipnvreck of everything 
which they made. " These lives are set forth as beacojt-lights, 
* ' to warn us offfro??i perilous reefs and quicksands, which have 
been the destruction of many, and which might only too easily be 



I 



THEOLOGIk..^!^ uOOKS. 



T re n c h — continued. 

T'::]' - P. Bull says^ ** they are, like ail ke "urriies^ affectionaif 



5ERM0N^ X .... -c-^ i.i Liis. ..ivri paiL lii Ireland. 8vo. 

iQy. (xi. 

This volume co-yisisfs cf Thirty-tivo Sermons^ the greater part of 
zvkick zc^rre preached in Ireland ; the subjects are as folltru's : — 
jacod, a Prince with God and zmth Men — Agrippa — The Woman 
that zcas a Sinner — Secret Fatdts — The Sez'en IVorse Spirits — 
Freedom in the Trttth — yoseph and his Brethren — Bearing one 
another^ s Bnrdevss — Chrisfs Challenge to the World — The Loz'e of 
Mtfnej — The Salt of the Earth — The Armour of God — Light in 
the Lmrd — The jailer of Fhilippi — The Thorn in the Flesh — 
Isaiak^s Vision — Selfishness — Abraham interceding for Sodom — 
Vain Tkoitghts — Pontius Pilate — The Brazen Serpent — The Death 
and Burial of Moses — A Word from the Cross — The Church's 
WoTskip in the Becntty of Holiness — Ez^ery Good Gifi from AbozY 
— On the Hearing of Prayer — The Kingdom which comet h not 
with Ohserzmtio'n — Pressing towards the Mark — Scml — The Good 
Shepherd — The Valley of Dry Bones — All Saints. 

Tudor.— The DECALOGUE VIEWED as the CHRIST- 
IANAS LAW. With Special Reference to the Questions and 
Wants of the Times, By the Rev. Rich. Tudor, B. A. CroTVTi 
Svo. los. 6d. 

The aittho'T^S ai' . .,_..._ ^an^u^in ^cyc^c oj' l^-.c L'^CLiLjguc 

in its apf lie a .:::■: :: :.:.'.:; \- •/ :V and questions. The work will 

other single zi'ork has hitherto 

•^Sy the First Part consisting of 

Second Part of twelve lectures 

.^Tuarrlian jl: vs ofit^ ^''His volume 

*/ of Christian 

.■ ... . .. ..... .. , .d forth system- 

:'.nly expressed — as good a specimen of 



5S THEOLOGICAL BOOKS. 

Tulloch.— THE CHRIST OF THE GOSPELS AND 
THE CHRIST OF MODERN CRITICISM. Lectures on 
M. Renan's "Vie de Jesus." By John Tulloch, D.D., 
Principal of the College of St. Mary, in the University of St. 
Andrew's. Extra fcap. 8vo. 4J". (id. 

While Dr. Tulloch docs not hesitate to grapple boldly with the 
statemoits and theories of Renan^ he does so in a spirit of perfect 
fairness ajid courtesy ^ eschewing all personalities and sinister in- 
sinuations as to motives and sincerity. The work will be found 
to be a fair and full statement, in Dr. Tulloch'' s eloquent style, 
of the case as it stands against Roian's theory. 

Vaughan. — Works by Charles J. Vaughan, D.D., Master 

of the Temple : — 

Dr. Vaughan^ s genuine sympathy with the difficulties, sorrorcvs and 
struggles of all classes of his felloiu-men, his thorough disi7iterested- 
ness, and his high views of life have been ackno^d edged by critics of 
all creeds. No se?'mons can be more applicable to the ever- 
recuri'vng ills, bodily, fnental, and spiritual, that flesh is heir to. 
His cominentaries and expositoiy lectures a7'e those of a faithful 
evangelical, but at the same ti7ne liberal-tiiinded i7iterpreter of 
what he believes to be the Word of God. 

CHRIST SATISFYING THE INSTINCTS OF HU- 
MANITY. Eight Lectures delivered in the Temple Church. 
Extra fcp. 8vo. 3^". (^d. 

The object of these Sermons is to exhibit the spii'itual wants of human 
nature, and to prove that all of thein receive full satisfaction in 
, Chi'ist. The various instincts which He is shewn to meet a7'e those 

of Truth, Reverence, Perfection, Liberty, " Courage, Syjnpathy, 
Sacrifice, and Unity, ''''We are convinced that thei^e are congrega- 
tions, hi number uninistakeably inc7'easing, to whom such Essays 
as these, full of thought a7id Iea7'7ii7tg, a7'e i72fi7iitely 77iore be7ieficial, 
for they are mo7'e acceptable, tha7z the 7'ecog7iised type of se7'7)i07is.'' 
—John Bull. 



THEOLOGICAL BOOKS, 59 

Vaughan (Dr. C. J.) — continued. 

MEMORIALS OF HARROW SUNDAYS. A Selection 
of Sermons preached in Harrow School Chapel. AVith a View 
of the Chapel. Fourth Edition. Crown 8vo. \os. 6d. 

While these Sermons deal with subjects that in a peculiar way concern 
the yotDig, and in a manner that cannot fail to attract their atten- 
tion and influence their conduct^ they are in every respect applicable 
to people of all ages. ^^Discussing^^'' says the ]6h\\ Bull, ^' those 
for??is of evil and impediments to duty zuhich peculiarly beset the 
youngs Dr. Vaughan has, with singular tact, blended deep thought 
and analytical ifivestigation of principles with interesting earnest- 
ness and eloquent simplicity.''^ The Nonconformist says ^^ the 
volume is a precious one for family reading, and for the hand 
of the thoughtful boy or young man entering life.''^ 

THE BOOK AND THE LIFE, and other Sermons, 
preached before the University of Cambridge. New Edition. 
Fcap. 8vo. 4J-. 6d. 

These Sermons are all of a thoroughly practical nature, and so??ie of 
them are especially adapted to those 2vho are in a state of anxious 
doubt. ** They 7?ieet,^^ the Freeman says, ^'in what appears to us 
to be the one true 77iethod, the scepticism and indifference to religious 
truth which are almost sure to trouble young men who read and 
think. In short, we know no book i7iore likely to do the young and 
inquiri^tg good, or to help them to gain that tone of mind wantitig 
which they may doubt and ask for ever, because always doubting 
and asking in vain. " 



TWELVE DISCOURSES on SUBJECTS CONNECTED 
WITH THE LITURGY and WORSHIP of the CHURCH 
OF ENGLAND. Fcap. 8vo. 6^. 

Four of these discourses were published in i860, in a work entitled 
Revision of the Liturgy; four others have appeared in the form 
of separate sermons, delivered on various occasions, and piblished 
at the time by request ; and four are new. All will be found tit 



6o THEOLOGICAL BOOKS. 

Vaughan (Dr. C. J.) — contimied. 

fall strictly tinder the present title, reviezuing the chief matters 
suggested by the Church Liturgy. The Appendix contains two 
articles, — otie oit ^^Subscription and Scruples,'''' the other on the 
^^ Rubric and the Burial Serviced The Press characterises the 
volu??ie as ' ' eminently zuise and tempo'ate. " 



LESSONS OF LIFE AND GODLINESS. A Selection 

of Sermons preached in the Parish Church of Doncaster. Fourth 
and Cheaper Edition. Fcap. 8vo. 3J-. 6^. 

This volume consists of N'lneteen Sermons, mostly .on subjects con- 
nected with the every-day zvalk and conversatio7t of Christians. 
They bear such titles as *' The Talebearer,'''' ^''Features of Charity,'''' 
*' The Danger of Relapse,^' ** The Secret Life and the Outward,''^ 
^ ^ Fa ??zily Prayer," ^' Zeal without Consistency," ''^ The Gospel an 
Incentive to Industry in Business," ^^ Use and Abuse of the 
World. " The Spectator styles them ^^ earnest and hutnan. They 
are adapted to eveyy class and order in the social system, and will 
be read with wakeful interest by all who seek to amend whatever 
may be amiss in their natural disposition or in their acquired 
habits. " 



WORDS FROM THE GOSPELS. A Second Selection 
of Sermons preached in the Parish Church of Doncaster. Second 
Edition. Fcap. 8vo. 45-. 6d. 

In this volume are Twenty-two Sermons on subjects taken from one 
or other of the four Gospels. The Nonconformist characte7'ises 
these Sermons as ^'' of practical earnestness, of a thoughtfulness that 
penetrates the co7?imon conditions and experiences of life, and brings 
the truths and examples of Scripture to bear on thein with singular 
force, and of a style that owes its real elegance to the sifnplicity and 
directness which have fine culture for their roots. ... A book thaii 
which feiv could give more holy pleasantness and soleinn purpose to 
their Sabbath evenings at ho?ne. " 



THEOLOGICAL BOOKS. 6i 

Vaughan (Dr. C. J.) — continued. 

LESSONS OF THE CROSS AND PASSION. Six 
Lectures delivered in Hereford Cathedral during the Week before 
Easter, 1869. Fcap. 8vo. 2s. 6d. 

This volume contains Six Sermons on subjects mainly connected with 
the death and passion of Christ. The titles of the Sermons are: — 
/. ** Too Late" (Matt. xxzi. 45 J. //. ** The Divine Sacrifice and 
the Human Priesthood.'' HI. 'L(rje not the World.'" IV. 
* * The Moral Glory of Christ. " V. ^^Ch? ist made perfect throtigh 
Suffering." VI. ''Death the Remedy of Christ's Loneliness." 
''This little voluf?ie,'' the Nonconformist says, "exhibits all his 
best charactej'istics. Elevated, calm, and clear, the Se7'mons 07ve 
much to their force, and yet they seem literally to owe nothing to it. 
They are studied, but their grace is the grace of perfect simplicity." 

LIFE'S WORK AND GOD'S DISCIPLINE. Three 
Sermons. Fcap. Svo. cloth. 2s. 6d. 

The Three Sermons contained in this volume have a oneness of aim 
indicated by the title, and are on thefollo^ving subjects : — /. '* The 
Work burned and the Woi'kmen saved.'' II. "The Individual 
Hiring. " ///. * ' The Remedial Discipline of Disease and Death. ' ' 

THE WHOLESOME WORDS OF JESUS CHRIST. 
Four Sermons preached before the University of Cambridge in 
November 1866. Second Edition. Fcap. Svo. cloth. 3i-. 6d. 

Dr. Vaughan uses the word "Wholesome" hei'e in its literal and 
oHginal sense, the sense in which St. Paul uses it, as meaning 
healthy, sound, conducing to right living ; and in these Sermons 
he points out and illustrates sez'eral of the "wholesome" character- 
istics of the Gospel, — the Words of Christ. The subjects of these 
Sermons are as follow: — /. "A'aturalness and Spirituality of 
Rez>elation — Grandeur and Self Control — Ti'uth fulness and Ten- 
derness. " II. ' ' Universality and Individuality of Christ's Gospel. " 
///. "Oblivions and Ambitions of the Life of Grace." IV. 
"Regrets and Preparations of Human Life." The John Bull 
says this voluf^e is "replete with all the author's well-known 
vigour of thought and richness of expression. " 



THEOLOGICAL BOOKS. 



Vaughan (Dr. C. ],)—coriti/uicd. 

FOES OF FAITH. Sermons preached before the Uni- 
versity of Cambridge in November 1868. Fcap. 8vo. 3J. 6d, 

The '^Loes of FaitJi'' preached against in these Four Sermons are: — 
/. '''• Unreality y IL. '''■Indolence^'' IIL. ^''Ii-rroerencey IV. 
* ^Ifieonsistency,^'' — * * Foes^ '' says the author ^ * ' zohich vnist he man- 
fully fought against by all who would be finally admitted into that 
holy communion and fellozvship which is, for time and eternity, 
the blessed company of all faithful people. " " They are written, ^^ 
the London Review says, ' * with culture and elegance, and exhibit 
the thoughtful earnestness, piety, a?id good sense of their author.''* 

LECTURES ON THE EPISTLE to the PHILIPPIANS. 
Third and Cheaper Edition. Extra fcap. 8vo. 5^-. 

Each Lecture is prefaced by a literal traitslation fi-om the Greek 
of the paragraph wJiich forins its subject, contains first a minute 
explanation of the passage on which it is based, and then a 
practical application of the verse or clause selected as its text. 
The Press speaks of these Lectures thus: — ^^ Replete with good 
sense and practical religious advice. . . The language of the 
Apostle assiwies a practical significance, which it seldom wears 
in the eyes of any ordinary reader, and Dr. Vaiighan^s listeners 
would feel themselves placed in the position of men receiving 
inspired instruction on the ordinary business of life. We can 
scarcely praise this plan too highly.''* 

LECTURES ON THE REVELATION OF ST. JOHN. 
Third and Cheaper Edition. Two Vols. Extra fcap. Svo. 95-. 

In this the Third Edition of these Lectures, the literal translations of 
the passages expounded will be found interiuoven in the body of 
the Lctures themselves. Ln attempting to expound this most- 
hard-to-understand Book, Dr. Vaughan, while taking fro7n others 
what assistance he required, has not adhered to any particular 
school of interpretation, but has endeavom-ed to shrtv fo7'th the 
significance of this Revelation by the help of his strong comjuon 



THEOLOGICAL BOOKS. 63 

Vaughan (Dr. C.J.) — continued. 

serise^ oilical acumen^ scholarship, and reverent spirit. ^^ Dr. 
Vaughan^ s Sermons,^'' ///^ Spectator j^/i", ''''are the 7nost practical 
discourses on the Apocalypse with which tue are acquainted. " Pre- 
fixed is a Synopsis of the Book of Rev el alio ti, and appended is an 
Bidex of passages illustrating the language of the Book. 

EPIPHANY, LENT, AND EASTER. A Selection of 
Expository Sermons. Third Edition. Crown 8vo. loj-. 6^. 

The first eighteen of these Serfttons wej-e preached during the seasons 
of 1 860, indicated in the title, and are practical expositions of pas- 
sages taken from the lessons of the days on which they zvere delivered. 
The last eight Serinons were added to the Second Edition. As in 
the case of the Lectures on Philippians, each Lecture is prefaced 
with a careful and literal rendering of the original of the passage 
of which the Lecture is an exposition. The Nonconformist says 
that ^^in sii?iplicity , dignity, close adherence to the words of Scrip- 
ture, insight into ''the mind of the Spirit,'' and pi-actical thought- 
fulness, they are models of that species of pulpit instruction to which 
they belong.'''' 

THE EPISTLES OF ST. PAUL. For English Readers. 
Part L, containing the First Epistle to the Thessalonians. 
Second Edition. 8vo. li-. ^d. Each Epistle will be published 
separately in its chronological order. 

It is the object of this work to enable English readers, unacquainted 
with Greek, to enter with intelligence into the meaning, connection, 
and ph-aseology of the zuritings of the great Apostle. ( i ) Each 
Epistle will be prefaced by an Int^'oduction containing information 
as to the circumstances, design, and order of its composition. (2) 
The Authorized English Version occupies the fo7'emost place in 
each page. (3) Beside it, in smaller type, is a literal English 
Version, made from the 01 iginal Greek. (4) A free paraphrase 
stands below, in which it is attempted to express the sense and 
connection of the Epistle. (5) The Notes include both doctrinal 
expla7iation and verbal illustration ; occasionally a brief word of 
application has been introduced. 



64 THEOLOGICAL BOOKS. 

Vaughan (Dr. C. J.) — continued, 

ST. PAUL'S EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS. The Greek 

Text, with EngUsh Notes. Third Edition, greatly enlarged. 

Cro^vn 8vo. 7^". 6d. 

This volume contains the Greek Text of the Epistle to the Romans as 
settled by the Rev. B. E. Westcott, D. D. , for his complete recension 
of the Text of the New Testanunt. Appended to the text are copious 
critical and exegetkal Azotes, the result, of almost eighteen years' 
study on the part of the author. The ^^ Index of Words illustrated 
or explained in tJie Notes^'* will be found, isf^ some considerable 
degree, an Index to the Epistles as a whole. ^^ I have desired,^^ 
the author says, ' ' to catch and to represent the meaning of each 
passage and of the whole, without deriving it from any secondaiy 
source. One of fuy pH)icipal endeavours has been, to trace through 
the Neiu Testament the uses of the more remarkable words or phi-ases 
which occur in the Epistle, arranging them, where the case requi^'cd 
it, under their various modifications of sense. " Prefixed to the 
volume is a discourse on *^St. PauVs Conversion and DoctHne,^'' 
suggested by some recent publications on St. PauFs theological 
standing, Jji the Preface to the Third Edition, which has 
been almost entirely 7'ew?^tten, among other things, is a Synopsis of 
the contents of the Epistle. The Guai'dian says of the work, — 
*'Eor educated young men his commentary seeins to fill a gap 
hitherto unfilled. . . As a whole. Dr. Vaughan appears to us to 
have given to the world a valuable book of original and careful and 
earnest thought bestowed on the ,acco77iplish7nent of a work which 
will be of much sei-vice and which is much needed.^^ 

THE CHURCH OF THE FIRST DAYS. 
Series I. The Church of JeiTisalem. Third Edition. 

" IL The Church of the Gentiles. Second Edition. 

" III. The Church of the World. Second Edition. 
Fcap. 8vo. cloth. 4^. dd. each. 
The work is in three volumes: — /. ^^ The Church of Jerusalem," 

extending from the 1st to the %th chapter (inclusive) of the Acts. 

//. ** The Church of the Gentiles, ''from the ^th to the i6th chapter. 

II L ''The Church of the World,'' from tJie i^th to the 2%th 

chapter. Whei'e necessaiy, the Authorized 'Version has been 



THEOLOGICAL BOOKS. 65 

Vaughan (Dr. C. J.) — continued. 

departed from^ and a nrcv literal translation taken as the basis of 
exposition. All possible topographical and historical light has been 
brought to bear on the subject ; and while thoroughly practical in 
their aim, these Lectures uill be found to afford a fair notion of tht 
history and condition of the Primitive Church. The British 
Quarterly says, — ^^ These Sermons are worthy of all p-aise, and 
are models of pulpit teaching.^^ 

COUNSELS for YOUNG STUDENTS. Three Sermons 
preached before the University of Cambridge at the Opening of 
the Academical Year 1870-71. Fcap. 8vo. 2s. 6d. 

The titles of the Three Sermons contained in this volume are : — /. 
* * The Great Decision. " //. * ' The House and the Builder. " ///. 
** The Prayer and the Counter- Prayer.'''' They all bear pointedly, 
earnestly, and sympathisingly upon the conduct and pursuits of 
young students and young men generally, to counsel whom. Dr. 
Vaughan' s qualifications and aptitude are well hiawn. 

NOTES FOR LECTURES ON CONFIRMATION, 
with suitable Prayers. Eighth Edition. Fcap. Svo. \s. 6d. 
In preparation for the Confirmation held in Harj'ow School Chapel, 
Dr. Vaughan was in the habit of printing lueek by week, and dis- 
tributing among the Candidates, sof?tezi' hat full notes of the Lecture 
he purposed to deliver to them, together with a form of Prayer 
adapted to the particular subject. He has collected these weekly 
Notes and Prayers into this little volume, in the hope that it may 
assist the labours of those who are engaged in preparing Candidates 
for Confirmation, ayid who find it dijficult to lay their hand tipon 
any one book of suitable instruction. The Press says the work 
^^ comrnends itself at once by its simplicity and by its logical 
arrangement. . . . While points of doctrine, as they ai'ise, are not 
lost sight of, the principal stress is laid on the preparation of the 
heart rather than the head." 

THE T\YO GREAT TEMPTATIONS. The Tempta- 
tion of Man, and the Temptation of Christ. Lectures delivered in 
the Temple Church, Lent 1872. Extra fcap. Svo. 3^-. 6^. 

5 



66 THEOLOGICAL BOOKS, 

Vaughan. — Works by David J. Vaughan, ,M.A., Vicar of 
St. Martin's, Leicester : — 
SERMONS PREACHED IN ST. JOHN'S CHURCH, 
LEICESTER, during the Years 1855 and 1856. Crown 8vo. 
5.9. (id. 

These Tventy-five Sennons ejnhj'ace a gi^eat variety of topics^ all 
of the highest interest^ are thoroughly practical in their nature^ 
and calculated to give a hopeful view of life as seen in the light 
shed upon it by Christianity. 

CHRISTIAN EVIDENCES AND THE -^BIBLE. New 
Edition, revised and enlarged. Fcap. 8vo. cloth. 5^-. dd. 

The main object of this series of Twelve Sermons is to shew, that, 
quite irrespective of any theory as to the 7iature of the Bible and the 
special inspiration of its authors, there is good and sufficient reason 
for believing that Jesus Chi'ist is the Son of God, who reveals and 
reconciles men to the Father. " This little volume,'''' the Spectator 
says, ^^is a model of that honest and reverent criticism of the Bible 
ivhich is not only right, but the duty of English clergymen in such 
times as these to ptct forth from the pulpit. ^^ 

Venn.— ON SOME OF THE CHARACTERISTICS OF 

BELIEF, Scientific and Religious. Being the Hulsean Lectures 
for 1869. By the Rev. J. Venn, M. A. 8vo. (ys. 6d. 

These discourses are intended to illustrate, explain, and work out into 
some of their consequences, certain characteristics by which theattai^t- 
ment of religious belief is prominently distinguished from the attain- 
ment of belief upon 7?iost other subjects. 

Warington.— THE WEEK OF CREATION; or, THE 
COSMOGONY OF GENESIS CONSIDERED IN ITS 
RELATION TO MODERN SCIENCE. By George War- 
ington, Author of '' The Historic Character of the Pentateuch 
Vindicated." Crown 8 vo. A^s.dd. 

The greater paii: of this work is taken up with the teachijig of the 
Cosmogony, Its purpose is also ifwestigated, and a chapter is 



THEOLOGICAL BOOKS. 67 

drc'oted to the consideration of the passage in which the difficulties 
occur. *M very able vindication of the Mosaic Cosmogony by a 
writer who unites the advantages of a ciHtical knowledge of the 
Hebreiv text and of distinguished scientific attainments. " — Spectator. 

Westcott. — Works by BROOKE Foss Westcott, D.D., 
Regius Professor of Divinity in the University of Cambridge ; 
Canon of Peterborough : — 

The London Quarterly, speaking of Mr. Westcott., says, — '*To a 
learning and accuracy which command respect and confidence, he 
unites what are not always to be found in union with these qualities, 
the no less valuable faculties of lucid arrangement and graceful and 

facile expression.''^ 

AN INTRODUCTION TO THE STUDY OF THE 
GOSPELS. Fourth Edition. Crown 8vo. 10s. 6d. 

The author's chief object in this work has beeii to shrcu that there is 
a true mean between the idea of a formal harmonization of the 
Gospels and the abandonment of their absolute truth. After an 
Introduction on the General Effects of the course of Modern Philo- 
sophy on the popidar views of Christianity, he proceeds to 
detei'mine in what way the principles therein ifidicated j?iay be 
applied to the study of the Gospels. The treatise is divided into 
eight Chapters: — /. The Preparation for the Gospel. II. The 
yezvish Doctrine of the Messiah. III. The Origin of the Gospels. 
IV. The Characteristics of the Gospels. V. The Gospel of St. 
yohn. VI. and VII. The Differences in detail and of arrant ge- 
ment in the Synoptic Evangelists. VIII. The Difficulties of 
the Gospels. The Appendices cojztain 7nuch valuable subsidiary 
matter. 

A GENERAL SURVEY OF THE HISTORY OF THE 
CANON OF THE NEW TESTAMENT DURING THE 
FIRST FOUR CENTURIES. Third Edition, re^^sed. Crown 
8vo. los. 6d. 

The object of this treatise is to deal with the New Testament as a 
whole, and that on purely historical grounds. The separate books 



68 THEOLOGICAL BOOKS, 

Westcott (Dr. B. Y .)— continued, 

of which it is composed are considered not individually^ but as 
claiming to be parts of the apostolic heritage of Christians. The 
Author has thus endeavoia-ed to confiect the history of the New 
Testa jnent Canon with the groiuth a^td consolidation of the Catholic 
Churchy and to point out the relation existing betzceen the amount of 
eindeiice for the authenticity of its cofnponent parts and the whole 
mass of Christian literature. ^''The treatise" says the British 
Quarterly, ^^is a scholarly performajice, learfud^ dispassionate^ 
discriminating, worthy of his subject and of the present state of 
Christian literature in relation to it." 



THE BIBLE IN THE CHURCH. A Popular Account 
of the Collection and Reception of the Holy Scriptures in the 
Christian Churches. Third Edition. iSmo. ^s. 6d, 

The present volume has been W7'itten under the impression that 
a History of the whole Bible, and not of the New Testament 
only, would be required, if those ujifamiliar with the subject were 
to be enabled to learn in what manner and with what consent 
the collection of Holy Sci'iptures was first made and then enl- 
arged and finally closed by the Church. Though the uwk is 
intended to be si?nple and popular in its method, the author, for 
this very reason, has crimed at the strictest accuracy. The 
History of the Bible is brought down to fhe l6th century, and 
the Appendix contains two articles,— I. ^^On the Histoiy of the 
Canon of the Old Testameiit before the Ch7'istian Era. " // 
''^On the Contents of the most ancient MSS. of the Christian 
Bible." 77i^ Literary Churchman j^j'j, ^^ Mr. Westcott' s account 
of the ^Canofi^ is true histor}' in the very highest sense." 

A GENERAL VIEW OF THE HISTORY OF THE 
ENGLISH BIBLE. Second Edition. Cro\\ai Svo. loj". 6d. 

In the Bitrodu^tion the author notices briefly the earliest vernacular 
versions of the Bible, especially those in Anglo-Saxon. Chapter I, 
is occupied with an aocount of tJie Manuscript English Bible fro?n 
the i^h century dowmvards ; a fid in Chapter II. is narrated. 



THEOLOGICAL BOOKS, 69 

Westcott (Dr. B. F.) — contimcecL 

with many interesting personal and other details^ the External 
History of the Printed Bible. In Chapter HI. is set forth the 
Internal History of the English Bible, shelving to ivhat extent 
the various English Translations zaere independent, and to zuhat 
extent the translators zvere indebted to earlier English and foreign 
versions. In the Appendices^ among other interesting and valu- 
able matter, will be found ^''Specimens of the Earlier and Later 
Wycliffite Versions;'' ^^Chronological List of Bibles f^ ^^An Ex- 
amination of Mr. Eroude^s History of the English Bible.^^ The 
Pall Mall Gazette calls the work ^^A brief scholarly, and, to a 
great extent, ati original contribution to theological literature. " 

THE CHRISTIAN LIFE, MANIFOLD AND ONE. 

Six Sermons preached in Peterborough Cathedral. Crown 8vo. 
2S. 6d. 

The Six Ser7?ions contained in this volume are the first preached by 
the author as a Canon of Peterborough Cathedral. The subjects 
are: — /. ''''Life consecrated by the Ascension.''^ II. '"''Many Gifts, 
One Spirit.'''' III. ^'' The Gospel of the Resurrection.^'' IV. 
''Sufficiency of God." V. ''Action the Test of Faith.'' VL 
"Progress from the Confession of God.'''' The Nonconformist 
calls them "Beautiful discourses, singularly devout and tender .''^ 

THE GOSPEL OF THE RESURRECTION. Thoughts 
on its Relation to Reason and History. New Edition. Fcap. 
8vo. 4$". 6^. 

The p-esent Essay is an endeavour to consider some of the elementary 
truths of Chj'istianity, as a miraculous Revelation, from the side of 
History and Reason. The author endeavours to sheiv that a 
devout belief in the Life of Christ is quite compatible with a broad 
viezu of the course of human progress and a frank trust in the laws 
of our aiun minds. After a "Statement of the Question,''' and 
an Introduction on "Ideas of God, Nature, Miracles," Chapter 
I. treats of " The Resurrection and History;"" Chapter II. " The 
Resurrection and Man ;" Chapter HI. " The Resurrection and 
the Church.'''' — '* We owe," the Patriot says, "Air. Westcott a very 



JO THEOLOGICAL BOOKS. 



Westcott (Dr. B. F.) — continued. 

great debt of gratitude for his very able little treatise^ so faithful 
to the great truths which are so precious to us^ so catholic and 
spiritual in its conceptions of these truths, and, 7?ioreover, so 
philosophical in analysis, organism, and presentation. " 

ON THE RELIGIOUS OFFICE OF THE UNIVER- 
SITIES, lln the Press. 

Wilkins.— THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD. An Essay, 
by A, S. Wilkins, M.A., Professor of Latin in^Owens College, 
Manchester. Second Edition. Crown 8vo. 3^-. dd. 
This is the Hulsean Prize Essay for 1869. The subject p'o posed by 
the Trustees was, * * The Distinctive Featui'es of. Christian as 
compared with Pagan Ethics." This the author t^^eats in six 
chapters: — /. '^ The Object and Scope of the Discussion." II. 
and III. ^''Paga^z Ethics — their IIisto7'ical Develop?nent," and 
their Greatest Perfection." IV. V. and VI. ^''Ch'istian Ethics 
— their Method, " their Perfection, " and tJieir Power. " The author 
has t7ded to show that the Christian ethics so far transcend the 
ethics of any or all of the Pagan systems in method, in purity and 
in pozuer, as to compel us to assiunefor them a?i origin, differing in 
kind fi'07n the origin of any purely huina^t system. * ' It would be 
difficidt to praise too highly the sphdt, the burden, the cojzclusions, or 
the scholarly finish of this beautificl Essay. " — British Quarterly 
Review. 

Wilson.— RELIGIO CHEMICI. With a Vignette beauti- 
fully engraved after a Design by Sir Noel Paton. By George 
Wilson, M.D. Crown 8vo. Sj. 6d. 

^^ George Wilson," says the Prefaxe to this volume, ^^ had it in his 
heart for fnany yeai^s to write a book corresponding to the Religio 
Medici of Sir Thomas Browne, with the title Religio Chemici. 
Several of the Essays in this volume were inteitded to for7n chapte7's 
of it, but the health and leisure necessa7y to ca7'7y out his plans 
were never attainable, and thus frag7nents only of the designed 
wo7'k exist. These frag 77ients, hoivever, bei7ig in 7nost cases like 



THEOLOGICAL BOOKS. y\ 

fiyiished gems waiting to be set, sojne of them are now given in 
a collected foryn to his friends and the public ^ — ^^ A more fascina- 
ting volume,^^ the Spectator says^ ^^ has seldom fallen into our 
hands. '^ 

Wilson.— THE BIBLE STUDENTS GUIDE TO THE 
MORE CORRECT UNDERSTANDING of the ENGLISH 
TRANSLATION OF THE OLD TESTAMENT, BY RE- 
FERENCE TO THE ORIGINAL HEBREW. By William 
Wilson, D.D., Canon of Winchester. Second Edition, carefully 
revised. 4to. 25^. 

* ' The author believes that the present work is the nearest approach 
to a complete Concordance of every word in the 07'iginal that has 
yet been made: and as a Concordance, it may be found of great 
use to the Bible student, luhile at the sa??ie ti7?ie it so'ves the 
imp07'tant object of furnishing the fjieans of comparing syno?tymous 
words, and of eliciting their precise and distinctive meaning. 
The knowledge of the Hebrew language is not absolutely necessary 
to the profitable use of the zvork ; and it is believed that 7nany 
devout and acctirate students of the Bible, entirely unacquainted 
7uith it, will derive great advantage from frequent refer e^ue to 
these pages. '^^ Introductory to the body of the work, the author 
gives a sketch of the Construction of Hebrew. The plan of the 
work is sijnple : every word occurring in the English Vei'sion is 
arranged alphabetically, afid under it is given tJie Hebreiv word or 
words, zvith a full explanation of their meaning, of which it is 
meant to be a translation, and a complete list of the passages wh^re 
it occurs. Eollawing the general work is a complete Hebrew and 
English Index, which is, in effect, a Hebrew- English Dictionary. 
Appended are copious examples of the Figure Paronomasia, which 
occurs so frequently in the Bible. 

Worship (The) of God and Fellowship among 

Men. Sermons on Public Worship. By Professor Maurice, 
and others. Fcap. 8vo. 3^". 6d. 

This volume consists of Six Sermons preached by various clergymen, 
a)id although not addressed specially to any class, were suggested by 



72 THEOLOGICAL BOOKS. 

nrcfit (iff arts to bt'lng the 7tiemba'S of the Working Class to our 
Churches. The preachers were — Professor Maurice^ Rev. T. y. 
Rozi'selly Rez'. y. Li. Davies, Rev. D. F. Vaughan. ** They are 
very suggestive to those who may have to prepare sermons, and well 
calculated to be lent amongst the more thoughtful pa? ishioners.^'' — 
Literary Churchman. 

Yonge (Charlotte M.)— SCRIPTURE READINGS for 
SCHOOLS AND FAMILIES. By Charlotte M. Yonge, 
Author of ''The Heir of Redclyffe." Globe 8vo. is. 6d. With 
Comments. 3J". 6d. 

A Second Series. From Joshua to Solomon. Extra fcap. 8vo. 
IS. 6d. With Comments. 3^". 6d. 

Actual need has led the author to endeavour to prepare a reading book 
co}ivenient for study zvlth children, containing the veiy words of 
the Bible, with only a fezv expedient omissions, and arranged in 
Lessons of such length as by experience she has found to suit with 
children's ordinary power of accurate attentive interest. The verse 
form has been retained because of its convenience for children reading 
in class, and as more resembling their Bibles ; but the poetical 
portions have been givett in their lines. When Psahns or portions 
from the Prophets illustrate or fall in with thena^'rative, they are 
given in their chronological sequence. The ScHpture portion, with 
a very few notes explanatory of 7nere words, is bound up apart to 
be used by children, while the same is also supplied with a brief 
comment, the pu7pose of which is either to assist the teacher in 
explainiiig the lesson, or to be used by 77tore adva7tced you7ig people 
to who 771 it may not be possible to give access to the authorities whe7ice 
it has bee7i taken. P7'ofessor Huxley at a meeting of the Londo7i 
School-board, pa7'ticularly mentioned the Selection made by Miss 
Yonge, as an exa77iple of how selections might be 77iade for School 
reading. ^^ Her Co7nments are 77iodels of their kiitd.''' — Literary 
Churchman. 



I 



MACMILLAN'S SUNDAY LIBRARY. 73 



In crown 8vo. cloth extra, Illustrated, price 4-$". ^d. each Volume ; also 

kept in morocco and calf bindings at moderate prices, and in 

Ornamental Boxes containing Four Vols., 2\s. each. 

MACMILLAN'S SUNDAY LIBRARY. 

A Series of Original Works by Eminent Authors. 

The Guardian says — "^// Christian households owe a debt of gratitude 
to Mr. lilac jiiillan for that useful 'Sunday Library.'^'''' 

THE FOLLOWING VOLUMES ARE NOW READY:— 

The Pupils of St. John the Divine.— By Charlotte 
M. YONGE, Author of *'The Heir of Redclyffe." 

The author first gives a full sketch of the life and zvork of the 
Apostle himself drawing the mateyial fro7n all the most trustivorthy 
authorities, sacred and profane ; the7i follow the lives of his immediate 
disciples, Ignatius, Quadratus, Polycarp, aiid others ; which are sue- 
ceeded by th^ lives of 7nany of their pupils. She then proceeds to 
sketch from their foundation the history of the many churches 
planted or superintended by St. John and his pupils, both in the 
East and West, Lt the last chapter is given an account of the 
present aspect of the Churches of St. John, — the Seven Churches of 
Asia mentioned in Revelations ; also those of Athens, of Nimes, of 
Lyons, and others in the West. ** Young and old will be etjually 
refreshed and taught by these pages, in which nothing is dull, and 
nothing is far-fetched. " — Churchman. 



74 MACMILLAN'S SUNDAY LIBRARY, 

The Hermits. — By Canon Kingsley. 

The z'olunie contains the lives of some of the most remarkable early 
Eg)'J>tian^ Syrian^ Persian, and Western hermits. The lives are 
mostly translations from the original biographies; ^^ the reader 
linJl thus be able to see the men as wholes, to judge of their merits 
and defects. ^^ — **// is fi'om first to last a production full of inter- 
est, wj'itten with a liberal appreciation of what is memorable for 
good hi the lives of the Herniits, and with a wise forbearance 
to7vards legends which mdy be due to the ignorance, and, no 
doubt, also to the strong faith of the early chroniclej's.'''' — London 
Review. 



Seekers after God.— By the Rev. F. W. Farrar, M.A., 

F. R. S. , Head Master of Marlborough College. 

In this volutne the author seeks to record the lives, and gives copious 
sa?nples of the almost Christ-like utteratices of, with perhaps the 
exception of Socrates, ^^the best and holiest characters prese^ited 
to us in the records of antiquity. " They are Seneca, Epictetus, 
and Marcus Aurdius, most appropriately called ^^ Seekers after 
God,^' seeing that ^^ amid infinite difiiailties and su7'rounded by 
a cor7'upt society, they devoted themselves to the earnest search after 
those truths zvhich might best make their lives ^beautiful before 
God. " The volume contains ^portraits of Aurelius, Seneca, and 
Antoninus Pius. ^^We can heartily recommend it as healthy in 
tone, instructive, interesting, mentally and spiritually sthnulating 
and nutritious. ^'' — Nonconformist. 

England's Antiphon. — By George Macdonald. 

This volume dea^s chiefly luith the lyric or song-form of English 
religious poetry, other kinds, however, being not infrequently in- 
troduced. The author has sought to trace the course of our 
religioics poetry from the iT^th to the 19/A centuries, from before 
Chaucer to Tennyson. He endeavours to accomplish his object by 
selecting the men who have produced the finest religious poetry^ 
setting forth the circumstances in which they ivere placed, cha^-ac- 
terising the men themselves, critically estimating their productions, 



MACMILLAN'S SUNDAY LIBRARY. 75 

and giving ample specimens of the 17' best religions lyrics, and 
quotations from larger poems, illustrating the religious feeling 
of the poets or their times. * ^Dj'. Macdonald has very successfully 
endeavoured to bring together in his little book a ivhole series of 
the sweet singers of England, and makes thetn raise, one after the 
other, their voices iii praise of God ^ — Guardian. 

Great Christians of France : St. Louis and Calvin. 
By M. GuizoT. 

FroT7i atnoftg French Catholics, M. Guizot has, in this volume, selected 
Louis, King of France iji the l^th century, and among Pro- 
testants, Calvin the Reformer ifi the i6th century, ^^ as two 
earliest and illustrious representatives of the Christian faith and 
life, as well as of the loftiest thought and purest morality of their 
country and generation. " Lt setting forth with considerable fulness 
the lives of these prominent and rep-esentative Christian 7?ien, 
M. Guizot necessarily introduces much of the political and religious 
history of the periods during which they lived. '"''A very interestiizg 
book,'''' says the Guardian. 

Christian Singers of Germany. — By Catherine 

WiNKWORTH. 

In this volume the authoress gives an accoimt of the prrincipal 
hymn-writers of Germany from the gth to the 19M century, 
introdticitig ample (altogether about 120 translatiofis ) specimens 
fro7n their best pi'oductions. In the translations, while the 
English is perfectly idio7?iatic and harinonious, the chai'acteristic 
differences of the poejns have been carefully iniitated, and the genei-al 
style and metre retained. The book is divided into chapters, the 
writers noticed and the hyj?ins quoted in each chapter, being re- 
presentative of an epoch in the religious life of Ger7?iany. In thus 
tracing the course of Germatt hymnology, the authoi'ess is ftecessarily 
* * brought into contact with those great movements which have 
stirred the life of the people.''^ — ^^Aliss IVin/cworth s volu?ne of this 
series is, according to our vieiu, the choicest production of her pen.'''' 
— British Quarterly Review. 



76 MACMILLAN'S SUNDAY LIBRARY, 

Apostles of Mediaeval Europe. — By the Rev. G. F. 

jNIaclear, D.D., Head Master of King's College School, London. 

In two Introductory Chapters the author notices some of the chief 
characteristics of the inedicm.>al period itself; gives a graphic 
sketch of the devastated state of Europe at the beginning of 
that period, and an interesting account of the religions of the 
three great groups of vigorous bai'barians — the Celts, the Teutons, 
and the Sclav es — zvho had, wave after wave, overflowed its surface. 
He then proceeds to sketch the lives and work of the chief of the 
courageous men who devoted themselves to the stupendous task of 
their conversion and civilization, duidng a per4od extending frofn 
the ^th to the I'^th century; such as St. Patrick, St. Columba, St. 
Columbanus, St. Augustine of Canterbury, St. Boniface, St. Olaf, 
St. Cyril, Raymond Sull, and others. In narrating the lives of 
these 7nen, many glimpses are given into the political, social, and 
religious life of Europe during the Middle Ages, and many interrst- 
ing and instructive irtcidents are introduced. '"''Mr. Maclear will 
have done a great work if his admirable little volume shall help to 
break up the dense ignorance which is still prevailing arnorig people 
at large.^^ — Literary Churchman. 



Alfred the Great. — By Thomas Hughes, M.P., Author 

of "Tom Brown's School Days." Third Edition. 

" The time is co??ie when we_ English can no lojtger stand by as 
interested spectator's only, but in zvhich every one of our institutions 
will be sifted with rigour, and will have to shew cause for its 
existence. ... As a help in this sea^rh, this life of the typical 
English King is here offered. " After two Intr^oductory Chapters, 
one on Kings and Kingship, and another depicting the condition 
of Wessex when Alfred became its ruler, the author proceeds to set 
forth the life and work of this great prince, shewing ho%v he 
conducted himself in all the I'elations of life. In the last 
chapter the autJior shews the bearing which Christianity has on the 
kingship and gover'nment of the nations and people of the world in 
which we live. Besides other illustr'ations in the volume, a Map of 
England is prefixed, shewing its divisions about looo A.D., as well 



MACMILLAN'S SUNDAY LIBRARY. 77 

as at the present time. ' ' AIi\ Hug/ies has indeed written a good 
book, bright and readable we need hardly say, and of a very con- 
siderable historical value.^^ — Spectator. 

Nations Around. — By Miss A. Keary. 

This volume contains 7nany details concerniyig the social and political 
life, the religion, the superstitions, the lito'ature, the architecture, 
the comme7xe, the industry, of the Notions around Palestine, an 
acquaintance zvith which is necessary in order to a clear and full 
understanding of the history of the Hebrew people. The authoress 
has brought to her aid all the most recent investigations into the 
early history of these 'nations, referring frequently to the fruitful 
excavatiojis which have brought to light the ruins and hieroglyphic 
writings of ??iany of their buried cities. ^^ Miss Keary has skil- 
fully availed herself of the opportunity to write a pleasing and i72- 
structive book. ' ' — Guardian. * 'A valuable and interesting volume. ' ' 
—Illustrated Times. 

St. Anselm. — By the Very Rev. R. W. Church, M.A., Dean 
of St. Paul's. Second Edition. 

In this biography of St. Anselm, while the story of his life as a 
Plan, a Christian, a clergyman, and a politician, is told im- 
partially and fully, much light is shed on the ecclesiastical and 
political history of the time during which he lived, and on the 
internal economy of the monastic establish?nents of the period. 
Of the worthiness of St. Anselm to have his life recorded, Mr. 
Church says, ^^ It would not be easy to find one who so joined the 
largeness and daruig of a powerful a7id inquiring intellect, with 
the graces and sweetness and unselfishness of the 7nost loveable of 
friends, and with the fo7'titude, clea7'-sighted}iess, and dauntless 
fir77iness of a hero, forced into a herd's career i7t spite of hi}7iselfj^ 
The author has d7'awn his 77iate7i,als fro77t co7ite77iporary biographers 
and ch7'oniclers, while at the same ti?tte he has consulted the best 
recent authors who have treated of the fnan a7id his tiT)ie. ''''It is 
a sketch by the ha7td of a master, 7vith every Ime i7ia7'ked by taste, 
lear7iing, and real apprehension of the subject.''^ — Pall !Mall 
Gazette. 



yS MACMILLAN'S SUNDAY LIBRARY. 

Francis of Assisi. — By Mrs. Oliphant. 

The life of this sainf, tJie foimdcr of the Franciscan order, and one of 
the most remarkable men of his time, illustrates some of the chief 
characteristics of the religious life of the Middle Ages. Much 
information is given concerning the missionary labours of the saint 
and his companions, as well as conce7'ning the religious and monas- 
tic life of the time. Many graphic details are introduced from the 
sainfs contemporary biographers, which sheiu forth the prevalent 
beliefs of the pcf-iod ; and abundant samples are given of St. 
Francis's own sayings, as well as a feiv specimens of his simple 
tender hymns. *^We are grateful to Mrs. Oliphant for a book of 
much interest and pathetic beauty, a book which none can read 



Pioneers and Founders ; or, Recent Workers in the 
Mission Field. By Charlotte M. Yonge, Author of '*The 
Heir of Redclyffe." With Frontispiece, and Vignette Portrait of 
Bishop Heber. 

The author has endeavoured in these narratives to bring together such 
of the more distinguished Afissio navies of the English and American 
Nations as might best illustrate the character and growth of 
Mission-work in the last two centuries. The object has been to 
throw together such biographies as are '7nost complete, most illus- 
trative, and have been found most inciting to stir up others — 
representative lives, as far as possible. The missionaries whose 
biographies are he7'e given, are — john Eliot, the Apostle of the Red 
Indians; David Br ainerd, the Enthusiast ; Christian F. Schwa7'tz, 
the Councillor of Ta7tjo7'e ; IIe7i7y Ma7i:yn, the Schola7'-Missio7tary ; 
Willia77i Carey a7id Joshua Marshi7ia7i, the Se7'af7ip07'e Missiona7'ies ; 
theyudso7i Fa77iily ; the Bishops of Calcutta, — Tho77tas Middleton, 
Reginald Heber, Daniel Wilso7t ; Sa77iuel Ma7'sden, the Aust7'alian 
Chaplain and F7'iend of the Mao7'i; John Willia77is, the Ma7'tyr 
of Er7'07nango ; Allen Gardener, the Sailor Alartyr; Charles 
Frederick Mackenzie, the Martyr of Za7nbesi. ^^ Likely to be one 
of the 77iost popular of the ^ Sunday Li braiy^ volumes.'''' — Literary 
Churchman. 



MACMILLAN'S SUNDAY LIBRARY. 79 

Angelique Arnauld, Abbess of Port Royal. By 

Frances Martin. Crown 8vo. 45". 6.'/. 

This new volume of the * Sunday Library' contains the life of a very 
re??iarkable woman founded on the best authorities. She was a 
Roman Catholic Abbess who lived more than 2QO years ago, whose 
life contained much struggle and suffering. But if we look beneath 
the surface^ we find that siiblinie virtues are associated ivith her 
errors, there is something admirable in everything she does, and the 
study of her history leads to a continual enlargmient of our oaun 
range of thought and sy?npathy. It is beliez'ed the volume is not 
surpassed in interest by any other belonging to this well-knoivn 
series. 



THE "BOOK OF PRAISE" HYMNAL, 

COMPILED AND ARRANGED BY 

SIR ROUNDELL PALMER, 

/;/ the following four forms : — 

A. Beautifully printed in Royal 32nio., limp cloth, price 6d. 

B. ,, ,, Small ISmo., largrer type, cloth, limp, Is. 

C. Same edition on fine paper, cloth. Is. 6d. 

Also an edition with Music, selected, harmonized, and composeci 
by JOHN HULL AH, in square 18mo., cloth, 3s. 6d. 

The large acceptance which has been given to " The Book of Praise''^ 
by all classes of Christiait people encourages the Publishei's in entertaining 
the hope that this Hy77inal, which is mainly selected from it, 7nay be ex- 
tensively used in Congregations, and ht so7ne degree at least 77ieet the 
desires of those who seek unifo7'7nity in co77imon wo7'ship as a 77iea7is 
towa7'ds that unity ivhich pious souls yearn after, and which our Lo7'd 
p7'ayed for in behalf of his Chuixh. '"''The office of a hy77in is not to 
teach co7tt7'oversial Theology, but to give the voice of so7ig to practical 
religion. No doubt, to do this, it 77iust e77ibody sound doctidne ; but it 
ought to do so, 7iot after the 7nanner of the schools, but zvith the breadth, 
f7-eedo77i, and si77iplicity of the Fou7itai7t-head. " Oil this p7'inciple has 
Sir R. Pal77ier p7^oceeded in the prepa7'ation of this book. 

The arrangement adapted is the following : — 
Part I. consists of Hy77i7is a7'7'a7iged acco7'ding to the subjects of the 

Creed — ^^God the C7'eator,^' ^'Ch7'ist htcarnate,^^ ^^Ch7'ist C7'ucified,''^ 

^^Ch7'ist Risen,^^ "C/^m/ Asce7tded," ^^Ch7'isfs Kingdo7n a7td Judg- 

me7it,''^ etc. 

Part II. co77ip7'ises Hy7n7ts arra7iged according to the subjects of the 

Lo7'd's P7'ayer. 

Part III. Hy7n7is for 7tatU7'al and sac7'ed scaso7is. 

There a7'e 320 Hy77i7is i7t all. 



CAMBRIDGE :— PRINTED BY J, PALMER. 



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